Against the Day (10 page)

Outside they found Trabant Khäutsch
ready with a twohorse hack poised for instant departure, and the Archduke’s own
doublebarreled Mannlicher resting nonchalantly but visibly on one shoulder. As
they were speeding along dodging grip cars, private carriages, police patrol
wagons with their gongs banging, and so forth, Khäutsch casually offered, “If
you’re ever in Vienna, and for any reason need a favor, please do not
hesitate.”

“Soon’s I learn to waltz, I’m on my
way.”

The Archduke, pouting like a child
whose mischief has been interrupted, did not offer comment.

Lew was just headed
out to Kinsley’s for a late steak when Nate called him into the office,
reaching to fetch down a new folder. “Old F.F.’ll be out of town in just a
couple more days, Lew, but meantime here’s somethin for you tonight.”

“Thought I might grab some sleep.”

“Anarchy never sleeps, son. They’re
meeting right down the El line a couplethree stops, and you might want to take
a look in. Even get educated, maybe.”

At first Lew took it for a
church—something about the echoes, the smell—though in fact, on
weekends anyway, it was a small variety theater. Up on the stage now was a
lectern flanked by a pair of gas lamps with Welsbach mantles, at which stood a
tall individual in workmen’s overalls, identified presently as the traveling
Anarchist preacher the Reverend Moss Gatlin. The crowd—Lew had been
expecting only a handful of malcontents—was numerous, after a while in
fact spilling into the street. Unemployed men from out of town, exhausted,
unbathed, flatulent, sullen
. . .
collegians
having a look in at possibilities for hellraising
. . .
Women in surprising numbers, bearing the marks of their
trades, scars from the blades of the meatpacking floors, squints from
needlework carried past the borderlands of sleep in clockless bad light, women
in headscarves, crocheted fascinators, extravagantly flowered hats, no hats at
all, women just looking to put their feet up after too many hours of lifting,
fetching, walking the jobless avenues, bearing the insults of the day . . .

There was an Italian with an
accordion. The company began to sing, from the
Workers’ Own Songbook,
though
mostly without the aid of the text, choral selections including Hubert Parry’s
recent setting of Blake’s “Jerusalem,” taken not unreasonably as a great
anticapitalist anthem disguised as a choir piece, with a slight adjustment to
the last line—“In
this our
green and pleasant land.”

And another which went,

Fierce as the winter’s tempestCold as
the smoth’ ring snow

On grind the mills of Avarice High
rides the crueleyed foe
. . . .
Where
is the hand of mercy, Where is the kindly face, Where in this heedless
slaughter Find we the promis’d place? Sweated, despised and heartiness, Scorned
’neath the banker’s boot, We freeze by their frostbound windows—As they
fondle their bloodbought loot—Love never spared a sinner,Hate never cured
a saint,Soon is the night of reckoning,Then let no heart be faint, Teach us to
fly from shelterTeach us to love the cold,Life’s for the free and
fearless—Death’s for the bought and sold!

. . . moving from the minor mode it had been in throughout
into the major, ending with a Picardy third cadence that, if it did not break
Lew’s heart exactly, did leave a fine crack that in time was to prove
unmendable
. . . .

For something here was striking him
as what you’d have to call odd. Nate Privett, everybody else at W.C.I.,
needless to say most of the Agency’s clients,

none had too good of a word to say
about the labor unions, let alone Anarchists of any stripe, that’s if they even
saw a difference. There was a kind of general assumption around the shop that
laboring men and women were all more or less evil, surely misguided, and not
quite American, maybe not quite human. But here was this hall full of
Americans, no question, even the foreignborn, if you thought about where they
had come from and what they must’ve been hoping to find over here and so forth,
American in their prayers anyway, and maybe a few hadn’t shaved for a while,
but it was hard to see how any fit the bearded, wildeyed, bombrolling Red
description too close, in fact give them a good night’s sleep and a square meal
or two, and even a veteran detective’d have a hard time telling the difference
from regular Americans. Yet here they were expressing the most subversive
thoughts, as ordinary folks might discuss crops, or last night’s ball game. Lew
understood that this business would not end with him walking out the door
tonight and over to the El and on to some next assignment.

·
    
·
    
·

It must have
been
that Austrian
Archduke. Look after one royal, everybody starts making assumptions. Anarchists
and heads of state being defined these days as natural enemies, Lew by this
logic became the natural gumshoe to be taking aim at Anarchists, wherever they
happened to pop up in the shooting gallery of daytoday history.
Anarchistrelated tickets began landing on his desk with some regularity. He
found himself out by factory fences breathing coalsmoke, walking picket lines
in various of W.C.I.’s thousand disguises, learning enough of several Slavic
tongues to be plausible down in the deadfalls where the desperate malcontents
convened, fingerless slaughterhouse veterans, irregulars in the army of sorrow,
prophesiers who had seen America as it might be in visions America’s wardens
could not tolerate.

Soon, along with dozens of file
drawers stuffed with the information he brought back, Lew had moved into his
own office, at whose doorsill functionaries of government and industry
presently began to appear, having surrendered their hats in the outer office,
to ask respectfully for advice which Nate Privett kept a keen eye on the market
value of. Of course this provoked some grumbling in the business, mainly from
Pinkerton’s, who, having assumed American Anarchism was their own personal
cookie jar, wondered how an upstart like White City dared aspire to more than
crumbs. The discontent became evident in the White City shop as well, as The
Unsleeping Eye began to lure away personnel, soon more of them than Nate could
afford to lose. One day he came bounding into Lew’s office surrounded by a
nimbus of cheer phony as nickelaquart bay rum—“Good news, Agent Basnight,
another step up your personal career ladder! How does. . . ‘Regional Director’ sound?”

Lew looked up, pokerfaced. “What
‘region’ is it I’m being packed off to, Nate?”

“Lew, you card! Be serious!” W.C.I.
had decided to open a Denver office, Nate explained, and with more Anarchists
per square foot out there than a man could begin to count, who better than Lew
to ramrod the operation?

As if this were a real question, Lew
began to recite names of plausible colleagues, all of them with an edge on him
in seniority, till Nate’s frown had grown deep enough. “O.K., boss, I get the
drift. It’s not up to you, that what you’re about to say?”

“Lew, it’s gold and silver mining out
there. Nuggets for the picking up. Favors that you can name your own price.”

Lew reached for a panatela and lit
up. After a couplethree slow puffs,
 
“
Ever come out of
work in this town when the light’s still in the sky and the lamps are just
being lit along the big avenues and down by the Lake, and the girls are all out
of the offices and shops and heading home, and the steak houses are cranking up
for the evening trade, and the plateglass windows are shining, with the rigs
all lined up by the hotels, and—”

“No,” Nate staring impatiently, “not
too often, I work too late for that.”

Lew blew a smoke ring, and a few more
concentrically. “Well now shit, there, Nate.”

For some reason
Lew felt uncomfortable telling the
Chums of Chance about his transfer. In the short time he’d been riding with
them, he’d almost come to feel more at home up in the
Inconvenience
than
he did at the Agency.

The visibility today was unlimited,
the Lake sparkling with a million highlights, the little electric launches and
gondolas, the crowds in the plazas adjoining the mammoth exhibition buildings,
the whiteness of the place nearly unbearable
.
. . .
Faint janglings of music ascended from the Midway pavilions, a bass
drum thumped like the pulse of some living collective creature down there.

Professor Vanderjuice was along for
the day, having completed whatever business had detained him in Chicago. Lew’s
detective reflexes warned him of something deeply evasive about this personable
academic, which he guessed the boys were aware of, too, though it was their
business what to make of it. His presence made it no easier for Lew to impart
his news, but he did manage at last to blurt, “Doggone but I’m going to miss
this.”

“Still some weeks till the fair closes,” said Randolph.

“I’ll be gone by then. They’re
sending me west, fellows, and I guess it’s so long.”

Randolph had a sympathetic look. “At
least they tell you where it is you’ll be sent off to. After the closingday ceremonies
here, our future’s all a blank.”

“It may not be quite the West you’re
expecting,” Professor Vanderjuice put in. “Back in July my colleague Freddie
Turner came out here from Harvard and gave a speech before a bunch of anthro
people who were all in town for their convention and of course the Fair. To the
effect that the Western frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was
no longer on the map but gone, absorbed—a dead duck.”

“To show you what he means,” said
Randolph, putting the helm over and causing the
Inconvenience
to veer
inland, bearing northwest, toward the Union Stockyards.

“
Yes here,” continued the Professor,
nodding down at the Yards as they began to flow by beneath, “here’s where the
Trail comes to its end at last, along with the American Cowboy who used to live
on it and by it. No matter how virtuous he’s kept his name, how many evildoers
he’s managed to get by undamaged, how he’s done by his horses, what girls he
has chastely kissed, serenaded by guitar, or gone out and raised hallelujah
with, it’s all back there in the traildust now and none of it matters, for down
there you’ll find the wet convergence and finale of his droughtstruck tale and
thankless calling, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show stood on its
head—spectators invisible and silent, nothing to be commemorated, the
only weapons in view being Blitz Instruments and Wackett Punches to knock the
animals out with, along with the blades everybody is packing, of course, and
the rodeo clowns jabber on in some incomprehensible lingo not to distract the
beast but rather to heighten and maintain its attention to the single task at
hand, bringing it down to those last few gates, the stunningdevices waiting
inside, the butchering and blood just beyond the last chute—and the cowboy
with him. Here.” He handed Lew a pair of fieldglasses. “That little charabanc
down there just making the turn off Fortyseventh?”

As the airship descended closer, Lew
watched the open vehicle pull up inside the Halstead Street gate to discharge
its passengers, and understood, with some perplexity, that it was an excursion
group, in town for a tour among the killingfloors and sausage rooms, an
instructive hour of throatslashing, decapitation, skinning, gutting, and
dismemberment—“Say, Mother, come have a look at
these
poor
bastards!” following the stock in their sombre passage from arrival in rail
cars, into the smells of shit and chemicals, old fat and tissue diseased,
dying, and dead, and a rising background choir of animal terror and shouting in
human languages few of them had heard before, till the moving chain brought in
stately parade the hookhung carcasses at last to the chillingrooms. At the exit
the visitors would find a souvenirshop, where they could purchase stereopticon
slides, picturepostcards, and cans of “Top Gourmet Grade” souvenir luncheon
meat, known to include fingers and other body parts from incautious workmen.

“Don’t think I’ll give up steaks just
yet,” Lew said, “but it does make a man wonder how disconnected those folks
down there’d have to be.”

“That’s about it,” the Professor
nodded. “The frontier ends and disconnection begins. Cause and effect? How the
dickens do I know? I spent my earlier hobraising years out where you’re headed,
Denver and Cripple Creek and Colorado Springs, while there was still a
frontier, you always knew where it was and how to get there, and it wasn’t
always just between natives and strangers or Anglos and Mexicans or cavalry and
Indians. But you could feelit, unmistakeably, like a divide, where you knew you
could stand and piss would flow two ways at once.”

But if the Frontier was gone now, did
that mean Lew was about to be disconnected, too, from himself? sent off into
exile, into some silence beyond silence as retribution for a remote and ancient
vice always just about to be remembered, half stunned, in a half dream like a
surgeon’s knot taken swiftly in the tissue of time and pulled snug, delivered
into the control of potent operatives who did not wish him well?

The boys gave
Lew a goldandenamel Chums of Chance
honorary membership pin to be worn beneath his lapel, which, upon being
revealed at any branch anyplace in the world, would entitle him to all
visitors’ privileges provided for in the C. of C. Charter. Lew in return gave
them a miniature spotter’s telescope disguised as a watch fob, also holding a
single .22 round which it was able to fire in an emergency. The boys thanked
him sincerely enough, but that night after Evening Quarters argued late over
the recurring question of introducing firearms aboard the
Inconvenience,
In
the matter of Lew’s gift, the solution was easy enough—keep it unloaded.
But the broader issue remained. “As of this moment we are all friends and
brothers,” Randolph supposed, “but historically any ship’s armory is a
freestanding volume of potential trouble—an attraction to wouldbe
mutineers, and little else. There it sits, waiting its moment, taking up space
that might, particularly on an airship, be more usefully assigned.” The other
danger was less easy to speak of, and everyone—except possibly Pugnax,
whose thoughts were difficult of access—found themselves speaking in
euphemisms. For cases were known and whispered through the service, more
certain than idle rumors or skystories, of extended duty so terrible in its
demands on morale that now and then, unable to continue, some unfortunate Chum
of Chance had decided to end his life, the overwhelming choice among methods
being the “midnight plunge”—simply rolling over the gunwale during a
night flight—yet, for those who might prefer less dependence on altitude,
any gun on board would present an irresistible appeal.