Onyx (65 page)

At the mention of Elisse, Justin was drained of loving compassion. He was remembering the general rottenness of their last meeting, the barefaced lying denial, that vituperative bigotry. He said tersely, “What are
they
doing here? We were meant to be alone.”

“What are you talking about, Justin? Caryll told your wife there'd be others, I heard him.” He added something, from his grin a jocular aside.

Justin could not comprehend the words, partly because of the roaring, screaming crowd, and also because of the blood thundering in his ears. His legs were trembling. “Elisse doesn't lie.”

“I didn't mean that. Listen, I want to meet her—”

“That's a detail she'd hardly neglect to mention.”

“What the hell difference do
they
make?”

“If you'd worked on the line, you wouldn't ask. Since I came back to Woodland, Security's put a couple of hundred union men in the hospital. Four so badly roughed up that they died. Keeley's a murderer. He belongs in jail. He's the last man you should have invited along if it's goodwill you're after.”

“It was your union's idea that we shake in public,” Tom said dryly.

Justin drew a breath against the blackness heaving up inside him. How was it that either he was overwhelmed by that old awed love or in an ungovernable rage? Why couldn't he face Tom—particularly on this mission—with the semblance of calm that he would have displayed to any other man? “Right,” he said.

“Word is you have two kids.” A loud cheering drowned out the rest of Tom's remark. “… swell gal, your wife, Caryll says.”

“Tom, you have me in a bind, but I'd prefer we keep this impersonal.”

The gray eyes glinted. “You're Zoe's brother,” he said. “One of the family.”

Your son, your son
, Justin thought, and his mental processes expanded and contracted like his frantically beating heart, yet so controlled was his expression that Tom saw only the fairness and decency of the younger man. Tom shifted his weight. If it weren't for the stranglehold promise to a dead woman, God help him, he would acknowledge his dismembering lie in plain sight of this horde of people.

He reached for Justin's hand.

The shake was in the exaggerated manner of political usage, hands clasped, biceps gripped, heads brought close. It was, to Justin's clear recollection, the only time that Tom had embraced him.

A deafening roar went up to the white sky. Cameras turned and popped. A multitude of throats cried:

For the union makes us strong
.…

“See you at eight sharp at the Book Cadillac,” Tom said. The negotiating would be on the hotel's neutral ground.

“Tomorrow morning,” Justin agreed.

Tom turned, jogging briskly down the steps, Dickson Keeley and the other two keeping up. Police held the shabby, delirious crowd back from their path to the limousine.

“What was you and the boss saying?” Coleman shouted.

Justin shook his head, unable to reply because he was wondering how he would get through the sessions in the hotel without disgracing himself with shouting matches or tears. He gripped the icy metal of iron railing, looking down with bloodshot, unseeing eyes. The crowd, viewing this as a celebratory pose, shook hats, placards, flags more wildly. “Huzzah! Hooray!”

Mitch stood by the sound truck, clenched fists thrust skyward, like a winning boxer; Krug's mouth moved savagely in his enthusiastic red face, Zawitsky raised his cap repeatedly. The AAW leaders were applauding him.
Where is Elisse
? His misery, lost loyalties, fears of contention in the hotel suite faded as he conjured up an image of his wife.
I need her so
.

Shiny-roofed limousines moved toward Jefferson. Police linked arms to hold back the heaving, surging crowd.
Where is she
?

“I'd best stick with you. Prof,” Coleman said near his ear.

“What?”

Coleman wet his chapped lips, shouting, “We should of brung ourselves some heavy pipe.”

Trotting purposefully up the steps was Dickson Keeley, his conservative homburg tilted forward, his cheeks puffed out importantly, followed by an even dozen overcoatless men whose shoulder holsters bulged under their dark jackets.

A tremor shook in Justin's throat, and his mouth went dry with fear.
Oh, stop it
, he told himself, glancing down on the noisy mob, staunchly theirs, the reporters and photographers clinging to their vantage places. “There's nothing to worry about,” he said.

“They ain't coming to congratulate us, Prof.”

“Go on back inside, Coleman. Tell them everything went off well. Nobody's going to hurt me, not here.”

But Coleman planted his large, worn boots next to Justin's.

IV

Since Hugh Bridger had confirmed the probability that his regime was grinding to a halt, Dickson Keeley had coiled around the impending loss, finding no solace in the assurance of financial well-being—what was mere lucre after omnipotence? His acrimony spilled over in a violent gush. To attack Justin on the overpass was wildly foolhardy, but none of Keeley's innumerable enemies had ever called him a coward.

Approaching the two AAW men, he shouted, “Not in any hot sweat to join your comrades down there, are you?”

Patches whitened the corners of Justin's mouth, and Coleman pulled at his collar as if it worried him.

“Your little woman must be waiting,” Keeley said, looking at Justin.

“Let us by,” Justin said.

“A swell tomato.” Dickson Keeley whistled appreciatively. “Hotcha!”

A snicker escaped the swarthy young man whom Justin recognized as having earlier accompanied Tom and Keeley.

“You won't talk about my wife.”

“I'm handing her bouquets,” Keeley goaded.

When Justin had released his grip on the railing, flakes of skin had clung to the icy metal, yet, digging his nails into his raw palms, he did not notice the pain. “I said not to talk about her, Keeley.”

“Prof,” Coleman said, grabbing at his sleeve. “There ain't no point arguin'. Come on.”

“Families are Security's job,” Keeley said. “You'd be surprised. A big part of my job. I look out for your sister—there's one red-hot mama.”

The cheers directly below turned into an angered rumbling as half of Keeley's group shifted so that they were behind Coleman and Justin.

A red mist of fury at the broken truce dimmed Justin's vision. “Get out of our way!” he said in a rumble.

“We're not about to do that. We're not about to let you go before the conversation's finished,” Keeley drawled. “Now your Elisse, she's one sweet bowl of honey.”

“Shut up!”

“What did she tell you about that little call we paid her?”

Unbearable suspicions pressed the breath, and all reason, from Justin. “You miserable, bleeding bugger,” he shouted. Flexing his knees, his full weight behind his clenched fist, he aimed at the square jaw. The move that Keeley's crew had been awaiting. The blow never landed. One of the men behind him grabbed his jacket, pulling it over his head, immobilizing his arms, muffling and blinding him. The same swift maneuver was used on Coleman.

Security closed in on their two helpless victims with the disciplined ferocity of a wolf pack. Justin and Coleman staggered and swayed as they were punched in their bellies and kidneys with fists hardened around rolls of nickles. Justin's groin was kneed, and Coleman's genitals were kicked after he fell.

AAW Brothers fought to get up the steps but were clubbed away by police.

Police were gifted by Security, paid off by Security, hired by Security when they lost their jobs on the force. Each year the chief of police received a new Swallow limousine from Hugh.

Justin's coat was released and he could again see. Three men held him while Dickson Keeley cut at his face with short, delicately cruel blows. Coleman was crawling to avoid the kicks, and Justin staggered backward, falling on his friend.

They were lifted by hands and feet, their bodies swung. They were hurled down the steps. Then dragged by the feet the rest of the way down the metal staircase.

Solidarity forever …

Photographers on the roof of the stranded trolley were cranking cameras aimed on the brutality.

“Get those goddamn cameras!” a voice boomed through a bullhorn.

As police hurried to obey, Dickson Keeley and his men, service revolvers aimed, rushed to the waiting limousines.

The beating had taken less than three minutes.

In those three minutes the triumphant crowd had shattered into myriad individual fragments of fear and outrage.

The infuriated Brotherhood were shoving toward the overpass. The terrified holiday throng pressed to escape. The area around the steps had become a savage whirlpool of confusion. Placards and handbags were used to thrust. Children were raised on shoulders, for there was a sickening danger of death by trampling.

“
Break it up! Break it up
!” Bullhorns blared.

Arms wearing khaki and dark blue rose and fell, clouting mechanically.

V

When Security surrounded Coleman and Justin, Elisse was trapped amid a group of men who shouted in angry Polish and smelled of sweat. Too short to see over them properly, she jumped up, catching truncated glimpses of Justin, his red plaid lumber jacket pulled over his head, staggering under the blows and kicks of the encircling thugs.
Oh, God, no. No
!

Her pupils dilated, her muscles hardened, and with frenzied strength that amazed her, she shoved her way through the bucking, unyielding Poles.

A sudden brilliance exploded.

The reddish radiance traveled overhead in a great arc like a comet come to destroy the human race.

Terrified men and women, teeth bared as if in exhilaration, shoved at one another. A vast, thick murmur rose from this part of Archibald, where the crowd was compressed as though in a slaughter pen.

The Very flare was the signal.

Along rooftops the gas squad snapped on rubberized masks. Police and Security below struggled to do the same amid the push of the crowd.

Elisse blinked to regain her vision. She jumped up to see.

The overpass was empty.

With a maddened shriek she shouldered her way forward, inching through the sweat-odored, churning, squirming mob with the frustrated slowness of a nightmare, her hostility shifting from that monster, Dickson Keeley, and his boss, Tom Bridger, who had authorized the assault, to the solid mass of people separating her from the overpass. “Let me through,” she yelled into red faces.
Are they still beating him
?

Captain Nugent, who had fired the Very flare pistol, lifted his arm. His men unfastened bulky bombs from their military belts, lobbing them as they might softballs down onto the crowd below.

“Watch out!” a man screamed.

Something that resembled a child's toy, a bulky blue-striped ball, dropped near Elisse. She could hear a crack like china breaking as it hit a man's shoulder.

From the ball drifted a greenish wisp that darkened to gray as it spread.

Gas billowed in clouds.

People sobbed from irritated tear ducts, and sobbing, gasped in more of the burning, nauseating fumes. Streaming-eyed mothers used their coats to shield babies, gagging fathers clapped fists over children's faces.

Someone—the voice was shrill, it could have been either a man or a woman—screamed, “Poison gas! Poison gas! We're goners!”

Those around Elisse convulsed. Vomiting, hysterically maddened people struggled to escape into the side streets.

Liquid fire poured into Elisse's throat, her eyes burned and streamed.
Tear gas
, she thought. “Tear gas! It's only tear gas!” she shouted as loud as she could in a vain hope of quelling the panic, and then dropped her purse to clutch at her mouth against the humiliation of publicly vomiting. All around her, frenzied, retching people thrust mindlessly in opposite directions.
Oh, God, God
, she thought.
I must get to Justin, I have to get him out of this
.

A Security guard, his face concealed by a black-snouted gas mask, stood like an improbable rock amid the panic, raising and lowering his billy. A frenzied woman wearing a man's hat, arms flailing, inadvertently forced Elisse into his indiscriminate range. A blow landed on her shoulder. She staggered. The thick-chested man next to her, his handkerchief tied over his face, held her erect against his sour-smelling leather jacket. “I'll get you out of here, girlie,” he shouted.

“Help me!” she screamed, her fists against his hard chest.

“Give me half a chance.”

“My husband's trapped over there,” she yelled.

“You'll find him later.”

“
Now
!”

“The overpass ain't no place to be!”

For a moment each tried to force the other in the opposite direction, a frenetic dance, then the crowd tore them apart. Elisse gagged again. A khaki arm, maybe it was the same one, descended on her head.

Her hat flew off, her feet grew heavy, their weight pulling at her thighs and buckling her knees.

“Justin,” she gasped.

Mitch honked the sound truck horn constantly as he steered around the clumps of racing people. Zawitsky and a couple of others clung to the running board while on the front seat, Justin, his forehead bleeding through handkerchief bandaging, huddled against Coleman's unconscious body.

CHAPTER 31

The house became a first-aid station.

Trembling, ancient Fivers and Model T's disgorged the wounded, and a red-headed young doctor risked his surgical residency at the Ford Hospital to suture gashes, feel for broken bones, syringe out burning red eyes. Odors of blood, vomit, and disinfectant permeated the living room where men, women, and children edged the sour taste from their throats with the refreshments Elisse had heaped out, sticky, stale bearclaws, largesse from the bakers' brotherhood, as well as coffee and red Kool-Aid.