Sundance (25 page)

“People, there's an Isadora Duncan rumor that she's leaving France. Anyone?”

He was also not good at intimidation. Too likable.

“A rumor that she's moving back to the United States. Of America. Is someone on that story? I need someone to bring me that story.”

In a moment of perception, Longbaugh was able to pick out the covert Pinkerton agent. As he watched him, he realized the agent was too obvious. Then he realized that everyone there already knew he was undercover and a Pinkerton. He wondered if that was to draw the attention away from the
real
undercover Pinkerton. He looked again. That might have been anyone.

He left the offices and located a bakery, purchasing a combination of pastries and doughnuts that they boxed for him. He returned to the offices and laid out the sweets. In short order, writers and editors came to him.
Flies to sweet,
he thought.

As a man with a handlebar mustache took a pastry, Longbaugh said, “Seen Prophet today?”

“Thank the Lord, no. He'll be along, though.”

As a man with a limp chose a doughnut: “Someone said Prophet's coming by today.”

“He thinks we'll take some piece he wrote.”

“That bad?”

“Unreadable.”

“What's he look like?”

“And you would be?”

“The one who paid for the doughnut you're eating.”

The limper tossed the doughnut in the trash.

He leaned back to wait for someone more congenial to indulge his sweet tooth. He unfolded a letter.

Etta was forthright about her life and its dangers. She was writing
the kinds of things he had never known her to share in the past, either in person or in the letters she had sent to him in prison. Perhaps now that she thought he would never get to see the letters, she was more comfortable expressing herself. Or she was changed by her journey and looked forward to sharing her new self. Or perhaps this was an act of valediction, a final accounting of the true nature of her flight. In the end, reading her honest words, he decided she was confiding in the man she hoped he would be.

The floppy literary editor with his hanging shirttail rambled over to gaze longingly at a pastry. He finally plucked it and became the first of the magazine's staff to acknowledge the benefactor and offer thanks. Longbaugh put Etta's letter aside and they slipped into conversation. Among other things, he learned that Prophet was small and had scary eyes. Longbaugh indicated the man across the room who had just come in. “Anything like him?”

The floppy literary editor turned. “Oh boy, just exactly like him.” He shrank, biting furtively into his pastry with his head down, as if that would keep Prophet from noticing him.

Prophet was indeed small, and while the woman in Paterson had said squirrelly, looking at his ears, Longbaugh imagined another animal. His oversized coat, however, did look as if a squirrel was wearing a beaver's pelt. Longbaugh mused that he must be roasting on this warm day. His hair was light and sheared short, uneven enough to suggest he had cut it himself. Had he let it grow, his large ears sticking out from his head might not have seemed so pronounced. Then he saw Prophet's eyes. They were pressed down into hard, small, startlingly blue circles. Prophet put a soft white hand into a coarse pocket and brought forth a sheet of paper folded into eighths. He unfolded his work—Longbaugh saw cramped writing that covered the page like ants on a honey spill—and tried to give it to the man Longbaugh had earlier pegged as the editor in charge.

The editor, tall and handsome and possibly thirty, with wonderful hair and strong lips, brought his palms up by his shoulders. Longbaugh had seen train passengers do that, rather than raising them overhead.
Prophet attempted to push the paper into the editor's chest, as if it might be absorbed there to be accepted, appreciated, approved, and adored. The editor shook his head slowly, palms now flat against his chest, and Longbaugh saw Prophet frustrated.

Longbaugh was quick to dislike the anarchist. He knew he should stay neutral, and Etta had described him with empathy. But Longbaugh felt no need to extend her charity. On the other hand, it was bad policy to prejudge the man, as he needed information, and an adversarial attitude was not the way to get it. If he wasn't careful, he was likely to underestimate him and miss something.

Harsh sunlight reflected off a window across the street and silhouetted Prophet, turning his large ears translucent. The image was so comical that Longbaugh suddenly understood Prophet's entire life, the teasing, bullying, and humiliation, the forced isolation until he actively chose isolation, cropping his hair defiantly, and Longbaugh thought to himself,
He's an anarchist because of his ears.
Prophet peeled his paper off the editor's chest and refolded it with his white hands. He surveyed the room to see who had witnessed his disgrace. Everyone had looked away, not wanting to be the next target. Everyone but him. Prophet's eyes found Longbaugh, and read his disapproval. Prophet pushed his way past the editor in charge and was out the door so quickly that Longbaugh was momentarily frozen. He followed, onto the sidewalk, watching the fleeing coat flap like a cape. He ran after him. Prophet looked back, saw him coming, and ran faster.

Prophet ran past Trinity Church, heading east on Wall Street, then turned north on Nassau. Longbaugh stayed after him, and they both slowed to a trot, until Prophet reached the subway station at Fulton. He turned, gave Longbaugh a quick glance, and ran down the stairs. Longbaugh followed, slowing to pay his nickel. He wondered if the anarchist had paid or if subway fares conflicted with his principles. On the platform, a crowd waited for the train. Prophet's size and head start made it unlikely Longbaugh would luck on to him, but he continued to look. He heard a subway train approaching from inside the tunnel. He leaned and saw a light growing closer, brighter. A warm press of wind
blew by as if a false train arrived ahead of the real one. The real one braked loudly to stop beside them, and every passenger watched the doors open. People came off. Then people got on. He craned his neck to see if Prophet was one of them, but he had already decided this was not the way to catch him.

He walked back to the offices of
The Masses
. He looked for the floppy editor and was told he had stepped out. The pastries had all been consumed while the thin box remained, a raft for crumbs.

Her writing confirmed things he had learned along the way. Some passages, however, were elusive, her words cautious, as if someone looked over her shoulder. He reread the letter where the initials SFS appeared for the first time, while thinking of her unfinished last letter, SFS traveling back and forth across the ocean. But he was unable to find anything to illuminate her later comment. In between, there were references to his journeys, as she concluded he was traveling exclusively on American ocean liners. Longbaugh did not understand what that meant.

He reread the section where she considered the benefits of hiding out with anarchists. This was written while she lived in the second boardinghouse, after having left Abigail's. He reread the paragraph where she wrote she would gladly enter the paranoid anarchist world if it would keep the Black Hand from finding her. Her only reservation was Prophet. He was in love with her.

The floppy editor returned, teeth sunk into an éclair, fingers covered in sweet.

Longbaugh smiled to see what he had started. “I should have brought more.”

“I shouldn't be doing this. It'll spoil my wife's supper. But I'll eat all of that as well when she sets it in front of me. Sadly.” He patted his proud belly sadly.

“May I ask you about Prophet? About Jonah Calvin?”

“Apparently you know more than I. For instance, his real name.” Indicating the handsome editor who had rejected Prophet's piece. “Although surely Eastman knows it.”

“Does he ever mention plans? Or where he lives?”

“Not where he lives. But he wants to be asked about his plans so he can pretend to be coy.”

“Did you ask?”

“Never.”

“So he didn't tell you.”

“Oh no, he told me every chance he got.”

“And?”

The literary editor looked at him suspiciously. “They tell me I'm a soft touch, but I'm fairly certain I should be more circumspect here.”

“Do you get the best out of your people?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Then whatever you're doing is working.”

“You're not one of my people.”

Longbaugh shrugged. “I bribed you with an éclair.”

The editor nodded, acquiescing. “I suppose I can rationalize that. You want to know his plans. Not sure how to answer that. He's not your typical anarchist. He's like the cliché of an anarchist. He'd like to make a name for himself. But it was as if he was asking me for ideas on how to do it.”

“I hear he likes to borrow other people's ideas.”

“Oh yes. Quotation without attribution is larceny.”

“You're doing that thing, taxation without representation is tyranny.”

The editor cocked his smiling head, pleased.

“How would he make a name for himself?” said Longbaugh.

“Well, first I suppose he should blow something up. Preferably with people in the general vicinity.”

“You suggested that to him?”

“Of course not. That's just how he would do it if he were the cliché.”

“You think he has that in him?”

“It's plausible, to prove a point and make himself appear important. Unless he blows himself up first.”

“So he doesn't inspire confidence.”

“Not in me.”

“And he'd use dynamite.”

“That would be the cliché.”

“Where does one get dynamite?”

“Well, ‘one' gets dynamite either from one who provides dynamite, or one who needs dynamite and stores it for future use, like those in construction. When they built Central Park, they cleared out acres of bedrock.”

“Central Park is complete.”

“The subway is not.”

Longbaugh smiled.

“Assuming,” said the floppy literary editor, seeing his shirttail out and tucking it in, “you can picture him with the guts to steal for his ‘cause.'”

•   •   •

L
ONGBAUGH
risked a return to Abigail's boardinghouse. He approached as Siringo had originally, circling in from blocks away, lurking to know if Siringo lurked. As he was well acquainted with the neighborhood, he was able to see without being seen in order not to be recognized. He might have consulted with any number of local peddlers, urchins, or even a few unrespectable bartenders to know if Siringo was near, but he risked that they were in Siringo's pocket and the information would go the wrong direction. Han Fei's help would have been welcome. But Han Fei was recuperating, and Longbaugh had resolved to shield him from any more danger.

Once he satisfied himself that no one was staking out the boardinghouse, he moved in to begin his own surveillance. He had been there only about an hour when he got lucky. Abigail came out the front door with empty bags over her arm. Shopping day. He let her pass by him to see if she was being followed. He picked up nothing suspicious and eased into the flow of pedestrian traffic. He did not fear losing her, as he was familiar with her routine and would catch up to her at any number of her favored stores and carts. But Siringo might know her routine as well. Longbaugh stayed alert.

He shadowed her from across the street, then moved ahead of her. He entered the pharmacy, which was usually her last stop. Even on those weeks when she had no need for soaps or cleaning products or medicines, she would peruse them idly before indulging her weakness for chocolates, as if by her attention to serious things she had earned that small wrapped box, a thing to hide at the back of the pantry. He stayed near the picture window, feigning interest in a shaving brush as he scrutinized the waltz of the street. Difficult as it was to pick out an enemy, on two different occasions he targeted possible stalkers with eyes on Abigail. Each time it proved to be an admirer of her looks. She seemed not to notice, and he thought that perhaps things were better in the marriage. She lingered at a fruit cart and he continued to catalog those wandering by.

She crossed the street to enter the pharmacy. She did not see him. He paralleled her along the far aisle, moving toward the back of the store and the stack of wrapped boxes of chocolates. She concentrated on other goods. The nearest customer finished her shopping and returned to the front of the store. For the moment they were alone.

“Abby.”

She turned, saw him, and froze. The furrow between her eyebrows deepened. “No, oh no, you can't be here.”

“I need your help.”

“You don't understand, you can't be here, men have been watching.”

“Men? What men?”

“Bad men. They're watching us. They could be watching now.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“No, they never, they didn't, they just lurk and watch where I can see them.”

“Have you seen them this afternoon?”

“Well, no. But that's why I pick this time to shop.”

Hightower had sent them. He pieced it together: Longbaugh knew that Hightower knew he had lied about Etta's death. Apparently he had decided it was because Longbaugh had found Etta, or was very
close. Hightower would have told Moretti, and Moretti would have demanded action. Hightower had placed men where Longbaugh was likely to turn up.

“How does Robert feel about that?”

“About how you'd expect. He's hoping they make a move so he can . . . do something.”

“I need to see him.”

“Aren't you listening? You can't.”

“It will make them go away.”

“No, no, please, just go.”

“When you get home, unlock the back door.”

She shook her head, looking back and forth as if someone might notice them talking and get the wrong idea. “I won't, I can't.”