Bapcat saw Jaquelle Frei and Jordy walking to his right, their eyes straight ahead.
By the time the front echelons of the long procession reached the graveyard gate, the tail of the procession, two miles back, was just moving out of Red Jacket. Bapcat would later hear that more than five thousand people had marched two miles in the snow and mud, and an estimated forty thousand more had formed a gauntlet through which the dead and marchers passed.
Bapcat and Zakov and their partners removed the casket from the hearse and walked it into the Roman Catholic section of the cemetery, where last night a single large trench had been dug as a mass grave. Boards had been fixed around the trench to allow for foot traffic, to get the bodies into the hole, and Bapcat and Zakov helped to lower Draganu into her final resting place. They stepped back into the crowd to await whatever ceremonies would come next as snow continued to fall and wind gusted from the northwest.
There were twenty-five dead Catholics and twenty-eight dead Protestants, each denomination consigned to their separate part of the cemetery, which struck Bapcat as strange and wrong. They had lived and died together; why could they not pass into eternity together?
A different priest appeared and conducted a ceremony in the same strange language Bapcat had heard in the church. People were packed into the graveyard, including dozens who had climbed trees and hung on branches like fat black birds. With all the thousands in attendance, the fresh snow had been mashed into brown sludge, and it was six o’clock and dark before the final interments were completed. All the mourners left as they had arrived, en masse, as silent as death.
Jaquelle and Jordy walked with the game wardens. “How can this happen?” the Widow Frei asked.
The men had no answers for her, remained silent.
John Hepting materialized from the crowd. “You seen MacNaughton?” the Keweenaw County sheriff asked.
Bapcat shook his head.
“Sonuvabitch isn’t here. None of the operators are here, not a goddamn one. Did you hear what happened to Moyer?”
“The union’s president?”
“The same. Alliance men grabbed him in his hotel in Hancock, beat the shit out of him, shot him, dragged him across the canal, and put him on a train to Chicago with two of Cruse’s men as guards. Some say MacNaughton was there, but I don’t know about that. Sonuvabitch has been afraid to show himself much since all this began. He likes to work through other people, not directly.”
“Why Moyer?” Bapcat asked.
“On Friday, Moyer accused the Alliance of creating the Italian Hall panic.”
“After Cruse accused the union on the day it happened.”
“There it is.”
“MacNaughton’s idea to give Moyer the heave-ho?”
“What do you think?” the sheriff said noncommittally.
“The governor should have kept all of the soldiers here, John, not just a few men from the local armory. As soon as they withdrew the violence got bad, fast.”
“Our prissy and inept Governor Ferris did not want the State to take sides.”
“When there is an oppressor and the State takes no sides, it is in fact siding with the oppressor,” Zakov declared. “This state has no position on mass murder?”
“Apparently not,” Hepting said. “In Ferris’s view, this is a private matter, not a public issue.”
“You could say that about every murder,” Bapcat said.
“Look around,” Jaquelle Frei said. “There are tens of thousands of people here. How private is that?”
“You finished with Skander?” Bapcat asked his friend.
“He’s already in the ground.”
“What about Cornelio Mangione?”
“The body has been released to his family.”
“And the man with him?”
“Nobody knows who he is. We buried him in a pauper’s grave. What the hell went on that night, Lute?”
“We gave our statements,” Bapcat said.
“Between us, off the record.”
“We think Mangione and his friend got set up. They were sent to rattle us so that someone could take them out while their focus was on us.”
“Any notions who?”
Bapcat shook his head.
“Coroner’s inquest tomorrow,” Hepting said. “Lucas is overwhelmed, said the people should judge for themselves. At least two-thirds of the jury will be Alliance men. You two were in the hall Christmas Eve. I talked to Dominick.”
“We were there.”
“Any thoughts?”
They stopped walking. “What are you driving at, John?”
“There are multiple reports and descriptions of a man wearing an Alliance button who yelled Fire and was seen to run away.”
“I’m sure Cruse will be on it,” Bapcat said sarcastically.
“The Fat Man couldn’t care less. Moyer is gone, out of the picture. Now the operators just want all the bodies in the ground and all this shit done and gone. Cruse made his accusation while the dust was still in the air and the bodies still being brought down, and you can bet he didn’t take that shot without permission or direction. Good tactics, to attack first.”
Zakov said, “The best strategy for overwhelming your enemy is to follow success with excessive force. You do not defeat an enemy face-to-face; you make him break and run, and destroy him from behind.”
“What if you don’t overwhelm him?” Bapcat asked.
“Counterattacks can be overwhelming and reverse the momentum.”
“You think the union will retaliate, John?” Bapcat asked.
Hepting said, “I think this is the end, Lute It may drag on, but it’s over. Christmas Eve drove the price too high.”
“Justice thwarted,” Jaquelle Fred said indignantly.
“There’s been neither justice nor fair play since day one here,” Hepting said. “Why should that change?”
Bapcat faced his friend. “If you had the guilty man here now, what would you do to him?”
“The one who yelled Fire, or the one who put him up to it?”
“Both.”
“I ain’t much on theoreticals,” Hepting said.
“You must have some thoughts.”
The sheriff chewed his bottom lip. “Time will tell,” he said, starting to walk away from them, but wheeling back suddenly. “A surface captain from C and H came forward and gave a description entirely different from any others provided. He claimed he was in the street out front, passing by, and he saw a man run out the front door minutes before the disaster.”
“How different?” Bapcat asked.
“Called the man a ginger-head.”
“And?”
“Questionable; an outlier.”
“Maybe he’s right and the others wrong.”
“Said captain works for Madog Hedyn.”
“Track-covering?”
“I can’t say that; not yet. What I do know is that everyone hooked to the operators is pointing a finger, and all their fingers point at the same place—at the union.”
“Conspiracy,” Zakov said.
Widow Frei asked, “John, do you honestly think the union would kill its own women and children to gain sympathy for the larger cause?”
Hepting looked at Bapcat. “The sheriff in me would arrest the two and seek justice within the system. The other part of me—the part I think of as a man—well, he wouldn’t bother troubling the system. And hell no, Jaquelle, I don’t.”
“The blackest of talk from a peace officer,” Zakov said.
“There can come a time when you have to lay aside your badge and oath and pay homage to a higher authority.”
As Hepting walked away Bapcat leaned over to Zakov. “He knows who did this.”
“Which p
art?”
“Both . . . all.”
“Why doesn’t he tell us?”
“He thinks we know, too, and he wants space for himself.”
“Do we know?”
Bapcat nodded solemnly. “Probably.”
“When will you share with your partner?”
112
Central Location
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1913
Zakov parked the Ford between a boulder and a poor-rock cascade, backing it into place, and Bapcat helped him cut several cedar boughs to cover the vehicle’s front.
They each carried a pack and a rifle, .45s in closed holsters. Snowshoes were lashed to their pack frames. Each took a white sheet and covered his regular clothes, the packs and rifle, so that they wouldn’t stand out at any distance.
The two men moved quickly down to the river. The temperature back in town was hovering near zero, snow steadily piling up. The temperature was lower here in the middle of the peninsula’s spine. The drive up had been hard, but by pushing and taking chances, they had gotten through.
Word had come this morning from Capicelli to meet him as quickly as they could get here. Jaquelle and Jordy were back at the hill, waiting.
The game wardens got close to the river and Capicelli stepped out of the tree line. “You fellas look like coupla damn ghosts.”
“What’s going on?” Bapcat asked, getting right to business.
“Cap’n Hedyn come to his brother’s house with that peculiar little fella and a big man carrying the same weapon you got. Four of ’em took off with packs and rifles to the north. Paulie’s bird-dogging them. I take you to find them, then you two are on your own. Me and Paulie, we’re done with this, okay?”
Bapcat slid off his pack, his mackinaw and wool sweater, rolled both, and wrapped them with twine, lashing them to the top of the pack frame. Zakov did the same without being told. In winter, sweat was your enemy. If you had to move fast and far, you stripped and added layers only when you stopped for any time.
“Prob’ly won’t need les raquettes,” Capicelli said.
“Better to have and not need then to need and not have,” Bapcat said tersely. He had lived in the bush for years, knew what he was doing. Winter here could kill fast.
“Suit yourselves,” the man said, taking off in front of them.
Capicelli took them up into steep, rocky country west of the village, aiming on a diagonal for the top of the spine. They took a knee at the top to wait for the man to range and find sign, which he did in less than five minutes, coming back so they could see him, waving for them to follow to the northeast.
The ground up here was surprisingly flat, but mostly devoid of trees. Been logged, Bapcat told himself, which meant there was probably a mine shaft nearby. Central’s miners had worked the Northwest Mine, south of town. What was up this way?
Their guide veered into a narrow defile between two hard rock spines that stuck up like black incisors. The sign led them eventually to a flat area, where the hard climb finally ended. Capicelli immediately knelt and used his hand to tell them to do the same. He immediately moved right, working his way through the edge of the trees, with a relatively open field to his left and in front of Bapcat and Zakov. The sign showed the trail going into the field straight ahead.
“We’re close,” Bapcat said. “Let’s add layers, drop packs here.”
Off in the distance Bapcat thought he saw another man moving toward Capicelli and held his breath until the two turned and started back.
“Paul,” the brother said. “Four men, three hundred yards ahead. They found a deer in a snow cone and killed it. They’re butchering it now, got a fire going, and they’re passing around a bottle.”
Zakov’s eyes widened.
“Hedyn brothers?” Bapcat asked.
“And two more,” their scout reported.
“One with a Krag?” he tapped his own rifle to show the man.
“Same.”
“Why are they stopped up here?”
The man grimaced. “Don’t know; just are. Don’t think they were looking for deer, but they saw breath coming up from snow piled against small white pine and shot into it. Deer got in there to keep warm.”
“What’s up here?” Zakov asked.
Capicelli said, “This whole mountain under us is a beehive of levels, stopes, tunnels, adits. This was the old Copper Falls mine from the way back. We’re leaving,” Capicelli added. “Don’t know what this is about, and don’t want to.”
“Thanks,” Bapcat said, and watched the men slide back the way they had come.
Bapcat whispered, “Wish we knew what brought them up here.”
Zakov replied, “Von Clausewitz reminds us that our intellect always hopes for clarity and certainty, but our natures often find uncertainty fascinating.”
“Van who?”
“Von Clausewitz, the great Prussian general and military strategist.”
“Prussian, like a Polish-Russian?”
“Prussians are Germans.”
“Why don’t they call themselves Germans, then?”
“Too complicated to explain,” Zakov said, showing his frustration.
He knows how little I know. Why is he with me? “Let’s move forward,” Bapcat said.
They rearranged some of their clothing so that they were almost entirely white, and went right through the woods where the Capicelli brothers had been. The wind was blowing steadily but lightly, the gusts done for now, steadying to a biting wind from the north-northeast. We’re in for it, Bapcat told himself. He didn’t understand why, but up here you could go from a clear day to a complete and total whiteout in minutes, and the whiteout could last for days once it descended.
Even with the wind, he could smell smoke, could tell it was a small fire, an experienced woodsman’s fire.
The field to their left was on a slight rise, and as they worked back to the north they saw the men, not thirty yards away, tucked inside a tree line. Just as the brothers had reported, he saw the Hedyns, Sergeant Frankus Fish, and, as he had suspected, Fig Verbankick. He now understood why the word innocent kept tugging at his mind.
“Did you know?” Zakov asked.
“Suspected, I think, but didn’t know for sure until now.”
A small deer carcass hung from a tree branch by its hind legs, the cape hanging down the front legs, dragging on the ground, bones showing where they had carved meat off the skeleton. It was last spring’s fawn and would taste good; thus, the smell of meat cooking in a pan on the open fire.
Why are they here? Bapcat wondered.
Frankus Fish stayed apart from the others, on guard, his rifle in one hand, his eyes roving continuously.
“Who is he?” Zakov asked.
“Rough Rider.”
“With you?”
“We were never chums.”
“Why is he here?”
“Ascher Agency.”
“How can you know this?”
“Remember our stop in Seney?”
Zakov nodded.
“Rudyard Riordan told me about him, and later I saw Fish in Helltown. I don’t know what his game is. He might be hunting me.”
“You have bad blood?”
“I crossed him once, made him lose face.”
“In Cuba?”
“Yes, before we went up the hill.”
“A long memory is a curse,” the Russian said.
Fish motioned north and said something to the Hedyns that Bapcat couldn’t make out. The brothers looked up, nodded, and prodded Verbankick. The three of them left camp.
“Stay with Fish,” Bapcat said, “no matter where he goes,” and crawled to his right as quickly as he could slide along, looking for cover to carry him in the direction of the three
men.
He saw that they stopped no more than fifty feet from the camp. Fig Verbankick was carrying a rifle. Strange. Bapcat crept along wooded cover to a place in some rocks beyond where the three men stood, and there he saw what they were looking at: a hole, perhaps twenty feet across, gaping and black. Bapcat crawled closer so that he could hear.
“DARK!” Fig said loudly and shakily as Philamon Hedyn attached a rope to Verbankick’s miner’s harness, the sort they used to make vertical ascents and descents along steeply angled stopes in deep mines.
“The bats shine in the dark,” Hedyn said.
“BATS SLEEP ALL WINTER,” Fig shouted. “DARK!”
“You’ll be able to see just fine when your eyes get accustomed to the dark. Fire your rifle now and let’s make sure it hasn’t frozen.
“BEER!” Fig screamed, and the shout and the unexpected rifle report made Bapcat flinch.
“Not long, okay?” Fig said, whimpering like a child.
“Just shoot a few; it’s your reward. You like to shoot, right?”
“LIKE SHOOT! Herman’s okay?”
“Herman’s fine,” Hedyn said. “Get down on your belly and we’ll let you down.”
Verbankick pivoted and tried to run, but Cap’n Hedyn swatted him in the head and drove a fist into this belly, and the little man went facedown in the snow, moaning, “I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE!”
“Herman will think you’re a baby,” the captain said.
Fig glowered, pushed backward on his belly, holding onto the rope, which the two men gripped, slowly lowering the man into the hole.
“DARK, DARK, DARK!” Verbankick squealed.
The brothers grunted under the effort.
“BEER!” Fig screamed from inside the hole. “DARK!”
“He’s sure got the lungs,” Philamon told his brother, and the two of them started laughing.
“DON’T SEE NO BATS!” came a shout from the hole.
Philamon eased toward the lip. “Feel around with your feet.”
Red Jacket Page 42
