Sundance (11 page)

A protester near him went to a knee. He reached for her hand and was shoved from behind. He kept his balance, broadened his shoulders to create space and got her to her feet. Two smirking prostitutes smelled vulnerability and charged, then saw him and switched to another target. Their smirks had changed too quickly to fury, confirming the sham performance. This was paid street theater. He wanted to gather the protesters, tell them to hire their own goons and hookers. He felt the
fury of the cause viscerally without having enough knowledge to understand it.

One prostitute grabbed a protester from behind and pinned her arms to her side as a second prostitute slapped her across the face. The lady protester boiled, jerked loose, and went at the slapper. The slapper pushed her to the ground. A policeman rushed in. Marchers backed up, inadvertently clearing space for the cop, and Longbaugh was left alone in the open, as he did not know how to back down. The cop came like an avalanche, nightstick cresting behind his ear, hungry to crunch the bone and meat of the protester's head. Longbaugh timed it, a step and he was in the policeman's path, his right hand rising to catch the cop's forearm in midswing and holding it there. They froze, his eyes drilling into the cop's rage, and he said simply, “Now you have a choice.” The cop's anger wilted to confusion and he twisted to break free. The protester crab-walked backward on her palms and heels, belly and thighs splayed to the sky. The nightstick dropped from the cop's grip and Longbaugh caught it with his other hand. He set the cop free and watched him back up and run. He handed the nightstick to a protester who looked at it as if she'd been given a magic wand. Longbaugh sidled back into the crush to become no one again.

But the woman he had protected did not take her eyes off him. She found her feet and followed, grabbing for his sleeve. “Thank you, sir, a thousand times thank you.”

Longbaugh backed away. “Forget it.”

She came on. “Who are you? Tell me your name.”

“I . . . better go.”

“I thought he would kill me.”

Nodding his head toward the cop. “Better stay out of his way.”

She turned to where he had nodded, her cop gathering more cops, pointing toward Longbaugh. Police interaction was a bad idea, considering his history. If arrested, they might find out who he was. He seized the moment to slip away. Blocked by others, he saw her turn to find him gone. She grabbed at the closest protesters, asking if they'd seen him.

He moved out of the crowd and hid in a brownstone doorway. The
pattern replayed itself, gangsters pointing prostitutes at protesters, prostitutes charging in, protesters fighting back, cops moving in to arrest only the protesters, dragging them bleeding into the backs of wagons on a side street.

He left the demonstration behind, the sound of the clash losing strength as the distance increased, echoing faintly through alleys and gradually growing so faint that the hum of battle meshed into the sounds of the city and was gone.

T
alk to me about ‘Triangle.'”

He had caught her off guard, coming in from out back, where she had stowed broom and dustpan. The sun caught her hair from behind and he was blinded by the halo, her face in shadow, eyes unreadable.

Her body tensed. “Triangle?”

“What does it mean?”

“Shirtwai—” The words caught in her throat and she swallowed. “Shirtwaist, Triangle Shirtwaist.” Even with her eyes in shadow, he was aware of a liquid glint.

“Someone said it was a fire.”

Abigail leaned backward as if she could put distance between her spoken words and her physical self. “March twenty-fifth, two years ago, 1911. Late Saturday, Saturday afternoon, at, um, four-thirty. Etta . . . Etta was there that day. I know you weren't here, you couldn't know, but everyone, everyone remembers where they were when it happened.”

Her voice cracked and she pushed by him and inside. She smelled of soap and work sweat, the aroma of everyday oblivion, and it struck him that the word “triangle” snapped her out of unconscious daily
existence into a fraught world he had yet to understand. She went to the door of the room she shared with her husband and closed herself in, and he heard the lock turn. He stood in the silence of the hallway. With bright sunlight falling through the door at his back, the light graded to black along the walls and he was unable to make out the staircase beyond. He knew better than to wait for her.

She did not serve supper to the boarders that evening, so they followed Levi's lead and served themselves. She did not join them at the table, and he did not see her at all that night. He grew weary of pretending to ignore Robert Levi's glower. Levi peppered his meal with occasional gibes. “Better food than in prison.” Longbaugh concentrated on his plate. When Levi said, “We come by our supper honestly,” Longbaugh excused himself and went outdoors.

He wandered the neighborhood, the island a meadow of lights, abristle with electricity. Heat came off the sidewalks despite the long-absent sun. She had planted the Liberty toy and the olive ribbons two years before. Things may have changed since then. Perhaps she didn't wish to be found. He chose to quash that frustrating inner voice. He had an obligation to know the truth. As he took the next of his small steps, he would seek out Queenie, then work his way to Giuseppe.

He stopped at a newspaper kiosk and bought a dime novel about the Cassidy gang, along with two pieces of hard candy. Wandering home, he left one of the candies on the post outside the boardinghouse, although that night he had not seen the Chinese boy.

He stayed up late, engrossed in the dime novel, sitting up in bed by a side table lamp, chuckling at the adventures attributed to him. He was entertained to know he had been heroic and dastardly, trigger-happy and dreamy, sentimental and cold-blooded. Perhaps the Kid in the book was, as Mina seemed to think, the ideal Black Hand adversary. He thought he would have been less amused had he read it when he was younger, before his visit to Rawlins.

He heard a noise on the other side of his door. His eyes twitched to the wardrobe where his holster and sidearm hung. A second sound and
his body coiled. He watched the doorknob for movement, listening with his skin. Then the unexpected, a newspaper sliding under the closed door. He watched it inch in, then stop with three-quarters of it showing. Soft footsteps padded away in the hallway. He swung his legs and his feet hit the floor, he bent and took up the paper, a copy of the
New York Times
. It had yellowed. He read horrifying words, then ran his eyes to the nameplate for the date: March 26, 1911. A newspaper more than two years old. The day after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

The headline was stacked three lines high in the center of the page:

141 MEN AND GIRLS DIE IN WAIST FACTORY FIRE; TRAPPED HIGH UP IN WASHINGTON PLACE BUILDING; STREET STREWN WITH BODIES; PILES OF DEAD INSIDE.

A photo beneath the headline had a caption: “The Burning Building at 23 Washington Place.” The photo was poor, framing only the upper floors, making it impossible to understand the building's height. A ladder rose from the middle of the photograph, but its reach was shy of the roof by three floors. In a small box in the photograph's corner: “Windows marked X from which fifty girls jumped—south side of building.” A column of smaller headlines ran down the middle of the page beside the photo: “The Flames Spread with Deadly Rapidity Through Flimsy Material Used in the Factory. 600 GIRLS ARE HEMMED IN. When Elevators Stop Many Jump to Certain Death and Others Perish in Fire-Filled Lofts.” The headlines went on, but his eyes blurred as Mary's words came back, followed by Abigail's words. Etta had been there.

He returned to the newspaper and read through the entire piece. Certain paragraphs gripped him and rang in his head, and he went back and read them a second time. The horror did not lessen with subsequent readings.

“Nothing like it has been seen in New York since the burning of the
General Slocum
. The fire was practically all over in half an hour. It was
confined to three floors—the eighth, ninth, and tenth of the building. But it was the most murderous fire that New York has seen in many years.”

“The girls rushed to the windows and looked down at Greene Street 100 feet below them. Then one poor, little creature jumped. There was a plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it, wrecking it and breaking her body into a thousand pieces.”

“One girl, who waved a handkerchief at the crowd, leaped from a window adjoining the New York University Building on the westward. Her dress caught on a wire, and the crowd watched her hang there till her dress burned free and she came toppling down.”

He read and reread deep into the night and did not look up until sharp dawn light flared in the window.

•   •   •

I
N THE MORNING
Longbaugh avoided his fellow boarders, leaving early through the back door. He made the long walk to the Hotel Brevoort. He was tired and sick at heart, and he carried the two-year-old newspaper folded in his suit's side pocket. He claimed a small table in the café. He left the old paper where it was and perused that day's newspapers one after another for references to the more than two-year-old Triangle Shirtwaist fire. He found none.

He was not clear in his mind as he read of the tragedies and triumphs of the previous day. The fire fell to the back of his thoughts until some offhand reference, often to strikes or working conditions, reignited his indignation. He nodded off at one point, awoke with a jolt, and did not know how long he had dozed.

He set down the newspaper. He closed his eyes and they burned. Images of fire curled in and scorched his mind's eye, and he could not escape the image of the girl with the handkerchief, caught on the wire, and then his brain could handle no more and he let go of her so she could fall.

He was surprised to learn that life could go on. He heard
conversations around him. They washed by, frivolous, yet charged with a kind of importance for their simple confirmation of everyday existence.

To his left he heard someone mention the Castles in
The Sunshine Girl
, and a minute later heard, on the other side of the room, something about Irene and Vernon in that Sunshine play. This coincidence of timing triggered his imagination and he began to listen. It was barely midmorning. Men were drinking their breakfasts, talking business, talking politics, bragging about their aspirations, underreporting their failures. Lubricated with drink, their voices waxed bold and supercilious. He overheard “Kaiser Bill,” and the name sparked a debate by the front door, glowed and flamed near the windows, then spread unevenly across the room, where here he was a tyrant, there war was unlikely, behind him the war would stay on the Continent, and back at the front door Wilson would keep us out. This was a new phenomenon to him, a conversational virus infecting a big room, running here and there until the fever crested and played out. When German politics faded, there was a run on the new renaissance. A smaller trend burbled about how senators being elected directly threatened the survival of the timber industry, the steel business, and the whiskey trust. Then a wave on modern technology, it had peaked and everything was already invented, so don't invest in research, until at another table, invention was in its infancy, so invest all you've got.

Across the room he overheard the words “. . . not staging another Wild West Show.” Longbaugh leaned forward to locate the source. He narrowed it to the two men aiming spears of tobacco juice at a spittoon. Etta had written him about seeing a Wild West Show. It had made her laugh.

He realized he wanted this diversion. Triangle burned too brightly in his mind, he feared for her safety on that day, despite the fact that it was well in the past. He found the Wild West Show idea interesting, his world brought east and dramatized.

Longbaugh approached the spitting men. “Did I hear you say something about a show?”

The fatter one folded tiny pink hands over a warm belly and eyed him suspiciously. “Something.” He scrutinized Longbaugh through one open eye.

“Never seen one,” said Longbaugh with open hands, apologizing for his naïveté.

“I gather you are unfamiliar with the West, sir,” said the fatter one.

“Unfamiliar?”

“Everyone in New York first encounters the West in Buffalo Bill's show.”

“I see,” said Longbaugh, not surprised, considering all he had encountered about the East Coast's fascination with the West. “And where will it take place?”

“You're asking a man fresh out of that business.”

“So you don't know, or there's no show?”

“Hasn't been a West show in New York since . . .” He nodded as if counting the years in his mind. “Well, a few years now. Whenever the Bills were in Madison Square Garden last. That's also when the Millers took their show to Europe.”

“Bills?”

“Buffalo and Pawnee, the Bills, surely you've heard of Buffalo Bill Cody?”

Longbaugh snorted inside. “Surely.”

“The Millers got their horses and stagecoaches confiscated by the British, someone over there thinks there'll be war. I was this close to investing in that one.”

“You can invest in a show?”

“You can, and I did. 'Twas my business. But my new passion is song and dance, pretty girls showing a bit of ankle. Pretty girls don't need stables or shovelers.”

“Although . . .” said his friend wittily, and they laughed together.

“Not
all
pretty girls drop their flops onstage,” said the fatter one.

“Just their frocks,” said his witty friend.

“From your lips.” The fatter one returned to Longbaugh. “That's the future, my friend, that's where the money is.”

Longbaugh dropped coins beside their glasses. “This round's on me.” He picked a red apple from the bowl on their table, polished it on the side of his trousers, and headed outdoors.

He stopped on the sidewalk, about to bite the apple when he saw the hotel doorman shooing a small boy. The boy simply moved to another location whenever the doorman had to go back to hold the door open for an incoming gentleman. After which the doorman's artificial smile vanished and he charged the boy again, who simply ducked and moved. Longbaugh saw it was the Chinese boy.

Longbaugh tapped the doorman on the shoulder. The doorman turned and was abruptly professional. “Yes, sir?”

“That's okay, he's mine.” The doorman looked at him as if he were out of his mind, but Longbaugh tipped him, and the man knew better than to argue with a customer. He returned to his post.

Longbaugh approached the Chinese boy. “You waiting for me?”

The Chinese boy nodded. “She's going over the line, cowboy,” he said with a seriousness reserved for dire news.

“Who's going over the line?”

“Lady at your house.”

Despite his confusion, Longbaugh held his tongue.

“Going to meet someone.”

“A man, you mean,” said Longbaugh.

“Yes.”

“Abigail is going to meet a man who is not her husband.”

“Yes.”

Longbaugh nodded. He rolled the apple in his palm. “And you know this how?”

“I know the man.”

“Friend of yours?”

The Chinese boy spat.

“I see.”

“Hates Chinks. Hates immigrants, but he's got it special for me. Got a bar on the Bowery. Was a ward boss, but even Tammany's sick of him. Small brain, big mouth.”

“Let me guess. You were following him, keeping an eye on him.”

“Saw him talking to her. Outside a lecture hall. She was afraid to go in, and he got friendly. Made a time to meet her.”

He looked at the boy, thinking him wise beyond his years. Then thought he was probably early teens, making him short for his years. Longbaugh waited, but the Chinese boy seemed to be finished. He continued to roll the apple in his palm.