Onyx (66 page)

Coleman's back was broken. Howling ambulances carried him and the other severely wounded to Harper Hospital on John R. Street.

Justin hunched on the stool in the crowded kitchen. His right eye had swollen nearly shut, and the gauze taped on his forehead bulged over an apricot-sized lump. Though still very dazed, he shook hands to calm the furious Brothers and with measured coherence guaranteed anxious-eyed families of sit-downers that their men were safe and well inside Woodland.

It was Mitch who organized strike captains to hustle their pickets back to the gates, Mitch who gave the official interviews.

Newsmen, fuming at the attack on their cameras, filtered through the jammed little rooms jotting down pro-AAW human interest stories, and flashing pictures. Reporters dug into their pockets, donating whatever money they had on them to the strike fund. For the first time the members of the press were staunchly on the side of the union and filed sympathetic copy.

The few intact plates of the beating on the overpass would appear in every paper tonight, would for decades to come surface in magazines and books, shadowy scars on Tom Bridger's reputation.

A thin, buck-toothed man edged over to Justin. “Daley, New York
Evening Post
,” he introduced himself. “Old son, you look in need of medication.” He unscrewed a finger-marked, tarnished silver hip flask, no doubt a relic of Prohibition. “Here's what the doctor orders.”

“Cheers,” Justin said automatically. Sweet rum burned through him, melting the encapsulation of numbness that had protected him. He realized he was nauseated and that pain cut above his eyes and ears, as though some enormous spoon were cracking the eggshell of his skull.

“Take another belt,” the buck-toothed reporter said.

Justin obeyed, returning the flask.

The reporter returned to the cluster of loudly irate AAW officials surrounding Mitch.

Justin sat more erect, his thought processes raveling.

Elisse
.

Mitch had told him that she had never shown up at the sound truck and therefore was doubtless making her way home on one of the crowded trolleys. But wasn't she taking a bit long? He squinted up at the red clock above the door. Roman numerals blurred. “Five to four!” he muttered.

She should be here by now. She damn well should be here
.

Mitch and the reporter were now conferring by the sink. Justin tapped Mitch's shoulder. “Come outside,” he interrupted peremptorily, and not waiting for a reply, went out the back door. Icy air cleared the remnants of cobwebs from his mind. “Where the hell can she be?” Justin asked.

Mitch looked bewildered. “Who?”

“Elisse.”

“What are you saying? Isn't she back?”

Justin shook his head.

Mitch's heavy brows drew together in a worried frown. He had witnessed the police herding vomiting clusters of people into the paddy wagons. “They must've taken her in,” he said slowly. “They've got headquarters packed.”

Their streaming breath mingled as they looked at each other in dismay.

“She would have called,” Justin said.

“The line's been busy.” Newsmen phoning in their
sympatico
stories.

“I'll get on downtown.”

“You're in no shape. I'll go.”

“I'm a lawyer.”

“Not in Michigan. Besides, anyone can post bail.”

“Don't argue. Have any cash?” Trapped in a wave of nausea, Justin spoke loudly.

Mitch examined him, then thrust his hand into his pocket for the wadded, crumpled bills that were donations from various reporters. Justin took thirty dollars.

He had worn his clothes for over two weeks. The shirt and heavy jacket were rusty and stiff with blood. He went up to change. The three garret bedrooms rang with coughing. Pale children coughed across the width of his double bed; the young red-headed doctor knelt on the rag rug between two relentlessly hacking women. Justin edged from the closet to his bureau, waiting impatiently with his clothes outside the locked bathroom. The hot water was long gone. He flinched under a swift, icy shower, shaving for a second time today. After he was dressed in a clean white shirt and his good suit, he stared into the mirror, seeing not his damaged features but Elisse's face glowing with love and laughter as she had said,
Fast work, Prof
.

He drove to the nine-story police building on Beaubien Street. She had not been booked there. He sped to two local stations. No arrest slip had been made out for her.

Outside the second station he halted under glass bowl lights. He winced; the freezing night air made his head ache more fiercely. Police, as a courtesy to Security, often hustled union members from one station to another, beating the solidarity out of them before finally booking them.
They'll know she's my wife
, Justin thought, his good eye narrowing to the same slit as the blackened one.

Hugh
, he thought.
Hugh will know the strings to pull to find her
. Justin's cold mottled hands clenched.
If he refuses, I'll kill him
.

II

He drove past the high-hedged private lane that led to Hugh's gatehouse—he would never be admitted through the magnificent eighteenth-century English ironwork gates. Justin, as a lonely boy, had often trespassed on the grounds of the neighboring estate.

The bricks of the lakeside path had sunk or buckled. Stepping cautiously through the darkness, holding up his hands to ward off branches of overgrown shrubbery, Justin was confronted by a ghostly counterpart. Two individuals moved along this path, one the man filled with outrage and fears for his wife, the other that teen-ager with his admiration for Tom Bridger—how he had admired and resented the heroic racer who had put the world on wheels! That boy's naïvely honorable vision saw only Hugh Bridger's kindnesses and generosities … how strange to coexist in a mnemonic duality with his schoolboy self. Justin reached the ice-covered inlet where canvasbacks halted on their spring and fall migrations. The southern boundary of this cove was cut off by Hugh's ten-foot wall. As Justin scrabbled around the end of it, clinging to the stones, he could hear the grumbling of water, the occasional sharp crack of shifting ice below him. He planted a foot on the slushy soil of Hugh's property.

At a faraway, muted roar he jumped. Then recalled Elisse reading him an article about Hugh's lions: she had made several sarcastic comments about the fact that the cost of their daily beef would feed a family of four a whole month. As Justin moved along the well-remembered paths of his uncle's exquisite self-imposed prison, his adult angers and anxieties faded and that boy—Hugh's wholehearted disciple—took over. He found himself thinking from Hugh's viewpoint. Hugh had taken him in, had endowed him with a palatial home, devotion, had schemed for his career. How had he been repaid?
I eloped with a girl he disapproved of, I returned to challenge the Bridgers
.

Shivering violently, Justin let himself into the servants' cloakroom. Sudden warmth dizzied him and he sat on a bench, resting his aching head between his knees a minute before he looked around for a clothes brush. Sprucing himself up, he hoped disjointedly that Hugh would not be evasive.

III

They awaited dinner in the downstairs library.

Tom still wore the gray suit from the noon meeting, but Caryll and Hugh had dressed. Zoe perched on the arm of her husband's chair, her head bent low to his so that a red-gold strand rested on his neatly combed, thinning brown hair. The years had succeeded in obliterating neither her passion for Hugh nor the dark, shaming blotch of his rejection, so she always intensified her normally affectionate manner to her husband in Hugh's house.
Let him never forget that one offer
, her strange little heart said.
Prove to him what he missed
.

Maud sat opposite the young couple, her ample lap covered with fine pink batiste that she was smocking into a dress for Petra—she, for one, refused to pay the outrageous prices for handmade children's clothes! The sofa table was strewn with evening editions, each with a front-page photograph of Dickson Keeley's pack attacking Johnny Coleman and Justin Hutchinson.

The grainy reproductions had activated a host of shames in Tom, and his sickened self-repugnance emerged, typically, as rage. He had barked questions at Hugh, who finally retreated to a silver cart to spoon inky black caviar onto Melba toast. His fingers shook, and he did not attempt a sprinkle of hard eggs and raw onion.

“I've told you and told you,” Hugh said, his voice rising. “I do not for the life of me know why Keeley went back up on the overpass. But every report says that Hutchinson attacked
him
.” He gulped down his caviar, not only agitated by Tom's anger but hurt by it. “I tried to protect you, that's all.”

“Some opinion of me you have,” Tom said. “You really believe that I can't appear on a public street without a goon squad, an army of gas experts, and every cop in the state of Michigan?”

Maud's needle ceased to flash. “Tom, Hugh explained. He was worried for you. We all were. Since Onyx shut down, Detroit's been in an uproar. All the auto companies have increased their guards. Hugh did what he thought was necessary. What's gotten into you? I've never seen you take on like this.”

Tom scowled to keep his composure. Justin must view Hugh's protective efforts, Keeley's thugs, and Nugent's skilled gassing of a holiday crowd as orchestrated by him. “From now on I'll smile when there's trench warfare outside Woodland.”

“Oh, you and your sarcasm,” his wife said, her voice without condemnation.

“The men were happy,” Hugh said. “Then those reds came and stirred them up.”

“Happy?” Caryll gnawed at the tape over one of his nails. “Why did we need five thousand men on the Security force?”

“Caryll, Caryll, you're blessed with an idealistic nature.” Hugh returned to his chair, crossing his legs and shifting the conversation from himself. “Every automotive factory needs to police itself, you know that. Otherwise the Polacks are forever at the Irish, the hillbillies are thwacking the Negroes, the Italians kill one another, and the Jews take away everybody's pay. How would we get a single day's work done without Security?”

“Dad used to manage.”

“That was before this infernal Depression. You heard Captain Nugent's report, you heard what he said.” Hugh's diamond cuff link caught the light as he waved a hand. “The rioters would be burning Detroit by now if we hadn't contained them. Let me tell you something else, Caryll. If you'd followed my advice, if you hadn't been so squeamish when the Bolshies occupied the tire shop, none of this would have happened.”

“I know you think I behaved spinelessly, Uncle Hugh,” Caryll said. “Maybe I did. But it goes against my grain to run Onyx like a slave camp.”

“What's so wrong with a firm hand?” Hugh asked.

“So that's what you call it,” Tom put in sourly. “A mere hundred or so at Harper, only seventeen on the critical list.”

“That miserable gas!” Caryll exclaimed. “No wonder they stampeded.”

Zoe rested her narrow, shapely hand on her husband's kneecap. “Can't we talk about something else?” she asked with a pleading smile.

“Zoe's right,” Maud said. “There's no unscrambling eggs. The riot's over.”

“A sweet opening to the negotiations,” Tom said.

“
Toujours l'audace
,” Hugh said. “I cannot for the life of me understand why you're against showing strength.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Tom said.

“Listen to me. This can be turned to our account.”

“You really play Machiavelli to the hilt, don't you, Hugh,” Tom said. “I went into this on the level.”

“Macllvray and his boys are working on releases,” Hugh said.

“Releases?” Tom asked. “What kind of releases?”

Hugh gestured to the strew of newspapers. “That's the other side. We have to tell ours.”

“I'm ashamed enough as it is,” Tom said coldly.

“This is vital, Tom. The press has never cracked down on you personally before. At the worst they've grudged you admiration. The news tonight is a direct attack on you. Maybe you can take it on the chin. But rotten publicity like this can kill sales for years. Trust me.”

“And you trust me.” Tom went to the marble fireplace where Yule greenery draped the Neville crest. Though he spoke in restrained tones because of the others, his eyes were the same gray granite as when, an adolescent forced to stand
in loco parentis
, he had been driven too far by his angelic-faced sibling's hypochondria or laziness. “No releases from Onyx.”

“Tom—”

“No releases. And that adder, Dickson Keeley, doesn't work in my shop anymore. From here on he doesn't work for any member of my family. Is that clear? Do you understand—”

He stopped as the door opened. There was a moment of silence before he grunted, an obscene, belchlike sound as though a fist had hit him above the stomach. He reeled back a step, resting an arm on the mantel, leaning heavily on the broad ledge of marble as he continued to stare at the door.

Hugh gasped and his chair creaked as he rose.

Caryll's head turned, his eyes widening as his mouth opened in a stupefied
o
, then he, too, stood.

Maud's sewing rustled to cover her short, wide satin shoes.

The Tudor beamed library was drained of sound and motion, save for the fire's crackling flames.

IV

Justin stood gripping the antique brass door handle. Eerie lighting from the chandeliers of the Great Hall darkened his bruises to black.

The four men were standing. In this moment of tension a familial resemblance connected them, weaving around them so that it was impossible to miss. Despite Hugh's scars, his whippet leanness, and dyed yellow hair (an odd vanity in a recluse), despite Caryll's ponderous Trelinack build and balding temples, the likeness was there.