Joe Hill (14 page)

Following Manderich’s heavy running shape across the court he put his hand up to his numb face. Cheek and Up and chin were dripping wet, and he tasted the metal taste of blood.

Manderich hissed over his shoulder and Joe followed him in pitch-blackness down what seemed to be another alley, following him by the crunch of his shoes in cinders. Back of them, apparently far away, he heard the faint noise of riot.

Now they came again into the open, and their feet felt rails. Over three tracks and around a string of boxcars, and they were headed toward town. But as they stepped out across another track a lantern burst from behind something and its light drove them backward, running again and hearing the pound of feet, the yells of pursuit. They dodged right, sprinted along a string of cars, dodged right again, working back toward the waterfront side. Looking back Joe saw two lights coming now instead of one, and when he turned his head there was a third light ahead.

Manderich swore. Yells converged upon them, and they ran, only to find themselves abruptly against a high wire fence with buildings beyond. “Left!” Joe said. They should be at the edge of the yards, and there should be a street crossing. If there weren’t, they were done.

Blood was seeping down under his collar. Whatever had hit him had cut him pretty deep. Trying to run silently, he turned his ankle on loose rock or coal and almost fell. Panic came up in him, and he sprinted.

Manderich’s soft grunt told him they had made it. The fence turned a right angle, they cut down a narrow street between buildings, crossed two sidings and were out of the yards. It was so black that they had to feel again, slowing to a walk. Ties of a spur track, gritty cinders underfoot, warehouse doors one after another, two feet above the ground. The noise of pursuit had stopped. Perhaps the yard dicks had stopped when they failed to pull the net against the fence. Along the door-broken wall they groped carefully, panting. Then both stopped at once. Ahead of them more wall, solid black. They were in a court, a pocket. If the dicks came in the other end they were trapped.

Before they had moved twenty feet along the wall, looking for an alley or outlet, the lantern appeared at the far end of the court.

The court was as bare as a field, no place to hide in, not even a platform to crawl under. There was not a chance to ambush and slug the pursuer. A short block away the light was coming toward them, unhurried and confident.

Manderich made a soft, furious sound of disgust, and stopped, but Joe leaped along the wall trying every warehouse door in a last deperate hope of escaping. Incredibly, the third door slid open a few inches with a light rumble and squeak. He hissed at Manderich, they slipped inside, Joe put his weight against the door and very carefully slid it shut again. He felt for bolt or hook, but there was none. Apparently some patent lock that had failed to catch. A watchman’s bonehead was their good luck. But there was no way of locking the door against the dicks.

He whispered to Manderich. “What if he sticks his head in here?”

“Knock it off.”

Leaning against the wall in total black, trying to breathe noiselessly through his mouth and hearing Manderich’s asthmatic wheezing six feet away, Joe keyed his ears for sound outside, but he heard nothing. Under the handkerchief he held pressed against his face, his cuts bled steadily. His collar was soaked, and the handkerchief was a wet wad in his hand. Nose and lip had begun to sting and burn.

His hand, groping cautiously behind him in search of weapons, found nothing. Then he realized that he still held the hatpin. That, then. It ought to take the fight out of a dick as fast as anything else. He listened.

Abruptly Manderich’s breathing stopped. Steps were coming closer, there was a rattle as a door was tried. Then steps were just outside, stopping. Moving an inch at a time, Joe slid the soaked handkerchief into his pocket and transferred the hatpin to his left hand. Flattened against the wall, he waited.

The door rattled, moved a little, slid. A crack of light split into the big gloom. Its diffused glow showed the shape of Manderich crouched beyond the opening, ready to spring. Joe gathered himself.

But in a moment the door slid softly shut again, the crack of light closed, the footsteps went on, and Joe heard the next door being tried, and the next, then a third, and then silence.

The letdown was worse than a fight would have been. For
unbearable minutes they stood rigid, waiting for something—the return of the footsteps, the rush of a whole bunch of dicks possibly gathered now outside, a flank attack from inside the warehouse. Both front and back, the dark was ripe with danger. Joe strained his ears until the faintest sound of a rat rustling somewhere deep in the warehouse, or the tick of a metal door contracting in the night chill, filled his whole head.

Why should a dick or a watchman, finding a warehouse door unlocked, simply shut it up again and go on without even locking it? It could only be that he was afraid to tackle the place alone, even with a gun and a light. He must have gone back for help.

“We’d better get out of here!” he whispered to Manderich.

“Maybe he iss vatching outside.”

“What’ll we do, then?”

“Vait,” Manderich whispered. “Vait and see. Maybe he aindt coming back.”

“He’s bound to.”

“Vait!”

In the dark there was no such thing as time. They might have waited fifteen minutes or three hours. Joe sat, holding the soggy handkerchief against his cuts, and felt how his face gradually stiffened and how the wounds began to develop a crust of dried blood. The blackness above and around was hollow and unending. It pressed in and down, and suddenly instead of being infinite it was close and smothering, so that he put out a hand half expecting to touch a silently encroaching wall. He had a moment of white-hot rage at whatever or whoever had hit him in the scuffle by the dock. Once he thought of Betty Spahn and her remark about his hard mouth. Was it the scars? He would have a hard mouth for fair now.

In the blackness, a mile or a yard away, something stirred. Old Art’s whisper was like something that came across space on a wire. “Dis is damn funny!”

“I’m for getting out.”

“Nah,” Manderich said. “Let’s vait a little longer.”

Joe heard him rustling and groping back into the depths of the warehouse, sliding his feet a few inches at a time across the gritty floor. After an indeterminable time his hissing whisper came back.

“What?” Joe whispered.

“Come on back here.”

He made little
pst pst
sounds for Joe to guide himself by, until Joe’s hands found bales of something—hemp, by the smell-stacked one on another, and Manderich’s
pst
came from directly above him.

“Come up and take it easy,” Art said.

“Don’t you think we’d better get out?”

“I t’ink ve better vait.”

Up on the tight bales they could stretch out. Some of the tenseness went out of the dark. When after a minute or two Joe felt the bales shaking under him, he realized that old Art was lying there laughing silently.

“That all happened kind of sudden,” he said.

“Dirty scaps, it’s a good t’ing,” Manderich said. He growled with pleasure. “I vish it had been me got dot cop’s horse. But by Gott you got him good. He vent up ten feet.”

“Where’d you get the hatpin?”

“In Austria ve carried hatpins for the
Polizei
,” Art said. “I learned dot from Johann Most. Alvays I carry it here, in my suspender. You still got it? Giff it back.”

Joe handed him the pin and lay back on the bales, staring upward and gently working the stiffened Up and cheek. “What do you think will happen now there’s been trouble on the docks?”

“More
Polizei
,” Art said. “Pinkertons and gunmen for scaps.”

“Then what do we do?”

“If ve don’t know vot to do ven a fight breaks oudt, ve should haff our heads examined,” Art said, and would have said more if Joe’s hand had not leaped out to grab his arm.

They heard the warehouse door roll gently open, roll shut again. No light came with it this time; it opened and closed in utter darkness. There was an indistinguishable low noise, rustling or whispering, and then feet moved on the gritty floor. In a moment Joe heard clear whispers. At least two of them then.

Afraid to stir for fear of making a sound, Joe lay on his back and strained to hear. It was Art’s fault. If they had cleared out when they had the chance they wouldn’t be trapped here now. Holding his breath, willing that even the beating of his heart should stop, he waited for them to begin the organized search that would hunt him and Art down.

Metal clinked, a match flared hugely in the barnlike space, and the steadying glow of a lantern swelled out against the dark. He heard their whispers again.

Why, if these were dicks or watchmen come to hunt them, were there only two? And why did they light a lantern so casually, making targets of themselves in case the men they were hunting carried guns? And why did they come now so incautiously into the warehouse, moving without hesitation or stealth?

The glow came closer, blocks and angles of shadow moved among the stringers overhead. There was a sound of stumbling, and an unguarded voice said almost aloud, laughing, “Yudas priest, give us some light!”

Joe rolled his head rigidly toward old Art, and in the vague passing glow saw the Austrian’s stiff face, the strained whites of his eyes. There was no mistaking the owner of that vaudeville-Swede accent and that laugh, and it did not take a very bright imagination to know who was with him.

As soon as the glow was well past, disappearing, blocked out by big heavy areas of solid dark, Manderich touched Joe and swung his legs and let himself down to the next layer and thence to the floor. Joe came after him, ready to laugh at the way they had cowered in the dark scared of every noise, in the very warehouse in all San Pedro where there was least chance a watchman would come that night.

They moved as cautiously as if the two ahead were police, creeping toward the faint glow. Joe imagined the look on Otto’s face when they surprised him. He had everything arranged so neatly—a fix with the night watchman who left a door open and stayed away for a certain time, then maybe a dray outside, or a house somewhere nearby where the stuff could be temporarily stored until it was safe to move it. With everything arranged in advance, Otto was obviously not afraid of being seen or heard. He would jump out of his skin when they popped up from behind something.

From a barricade of crates he and Manderich watched Otto and John stoop and pull among long, cylindrical bales—rugs, by their look. The lantern threw their shadows wide and huge. Hoisting a bale on each shoulder, they carried them to the doorway, dumped them, and came back for more, working silently and fast.

“Look at the sonsofpitches!” Manderich whispered harshly in Joe’s ear. “Union men!”

That was the first indication Joe had had that their spying from the darkness had any other object than a joke. But in the obscurity he could just see Art’s face. It was set like cement.

John and Otto were stooping for a third load when Manderich stepped into the light, Joe just behind him. The thieves spun around, crouching. If it had been a joke it would have been very laughable to see how Otto’s hands let go of the bale and how the right one jerked inside the breast of his coat, and how John stood stupidly with his mouth open, a bale hanging limply from his hands.

“Making qvite a haul,” Manderich said. After the whispering and the dry cautious hisses his voice grated.

The momentary tableau relaxed, Otto straightened slowly, his face assuming the silly dangling grin that it habitually wore. Recognizing Art and Joe, John sat down on a bale and wiped his forehead.

“You scared the hell out of me,” Otto said. “What are you guys doing down here?” As his eyes came over to Joe, his smile deepened as if he acknowledged and understood something.

Art’s dry, unlubricated croak said, “Ve got a tip from headqvarters dere vas some shtealing going on.”

Strolling past the lantern, he experimentally kicked the bale that John sat on, testing with his toe what it contained. John wagged his head, “Holy smoke …” he said.

With the speed of a cat springing Manderich was on Otto, bear-hugging him, wrestling him down. Before Joe could move or John get his feet under him to rise, Art had stepped back with a flat black automatic in his hand. Otto rose slowly from one knee, watching him pull the clip and pump the shell from the chamber. Without turning Manderich passed gun and clip and shells back to Joe, who dropped them in his pocket.

“I vouldn’t take a chance on you, Otto,” Art said. “You are too crooked to trust.”

The smile had not quite left Otto’s face, but his eyes were narrowed almost shut and his lips were stiffly curved, like something modeled in wax. Confused and unsure, taken for an ally by Manderich but unwilling to put himself against John and Otto, Joe stayed back. He did not especially like Otto, but he half resented the way Manderich acted like the chief of police.

“What do you want?” Otto said slowly. “A cut? You didn’t have to strongarm your way in. Four of us can pack out twice as much as two.”

“Cut?” Art said. “Listen, you sonofapitch, vhile I tell you somet’ing. Effery time somebody lifts some cargo, who gets blamed? The
IWW
, so? I do not like a sonofapitch who goes around shtealing tings vhile he hides behindt a union button.”

Otto’s stiff lips curved more deeply. Joe saw that they were rigid with anger, but Otto stayed quiet and loose, shoulders drooping, arms hanging. He said only, “When did you sprout wings?”

“I am not holy, by Gott,” Manderich said. “I am only …”

“Or the union either?” Otto said. “Maybe you’d like me to list a few …”

“You shut your gott damned mout’!” Manderich said. On the bale John Alberg stirred, glanced almost desperately at Joe, opened his mouth and closed it again without speaking. Out behind the tense little lighted core Joe could hear the silence of the warehouse hum.

“Dere iss a difference between a revolutionary and a gott damn t’ief,” Manderich said. “I am telling you somet’ing now. Vunce I knew a hood up in Tacoma like you, using the union to hid behindt. He vas found out along the tracks. A union hass no place for hoods. I vonder vot the boys vould say if I should tell aboudt you.”