The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 10

and farthest east the disreputable variety houses showing the likes of Ursula the Great and the Famous Fighting Fitz, who battled five men and then punched a horse to the ground. These spectacles ran up against saloons and gambling houses, faro and opium, shelters for wayward girls, betting halls and drinking halls and sporting halls and social halls, a hall for every vice and veteran of war, Spanish and Civil, and unions, too, do-gooders and service clubbers, Salvation Army and Temperance League and merciful Souls of Mercy—cause and effect, disease and cure all swirled up in the loin, block after block of wretched glorious humanity wandering the east-end streets and alleys, hungry, thirsty, lonely beggars and bums and hands and sawyers and millers and miners and scuffs, broke brothers and failed fathers and godforsaken grandfathers, all languages, religions, and races, crib rats and saloon girls, temperance ladies, nuns and cons and pickpockets and socialists and suffragists, the wicked, broken, and unholy—Americans, them, too, every one.

But as poor as that side of Spokane was, the other was more than its equal in wealth, Browne’s Addition and the bookshelf boulevards of the South Hill bursting with grand estates, mansions that covered whole blocks, their houses gabled and gilded and turreted and corniced and columned and dormered and portico’d and butlered and drivered and maided, and good God go hungry, a man walking those streets would be crazy not to ponder the Wobbly pitch—hell, why not a union of all men and women, especially in a world like this, where a rich handful lived in the clouds while the rest starved and slaved and slept on dirt only to be rousted from sleep by an angry mob intent on drowning you.

They were on a plateau above the river, in Browne’s Addition, high iron fences fronting estates, hired men watching from gatehouse windows. Early was still jawing with Gig. “I just don’t see how you fight a class war without the war.”

Three other floaters had fallen in with them as they walked toward the smoky center of downtown and the IWW’s free breakfast. Two of the men were old hands who’d put up hay near Omak with Jules, and they recounted bunkhouse stories that brought out his big laugh again. The third was a young black hotel porter who introduced himself as Everett and told Rye he was paid two thirds what white porters got and wasn’t allowed in their union. “My boss would fire me if I became a Wobbly,” Everett said, “but he can’t stop me from having breakfast.”

An electric streetcar rumbled by, tracks webbing the city, lines crackling above them like sparking marionette strings. Through the window of the streetcar, Rye saw scowling faces and imagined what they must think of this parade, Gig in the lead like some tramp general.

Across the street, a man in a coat long enough to cover a rifle straightened up as they passed, Rye remembering that a police officer had been killed two nights ago and that every cop, detective, and mining tough would be on the street in the coming days.

The doors had just opened on the big IWW Hall on Front Street, and they lined up at the canteen for breakfast—oatmeal, coffee, and wheat-flour biscuits. They took their food through the double doors into the big meeting hall, and even Gig and Early went quiet as they filled their bellies.

Rye had just gone back for seconds when the street door flew open and the big police chief, John Sullivan, came in. He looked around like he was thinking of buying the building, stood bow-legged in the anteroom between newsstand and canteen, eyes scraping the pamphlets, posters, and flyers on the walls until they landed on Rye, who was holding a bowl of oatmeal. A scowl rose on the chief’s face, a good two inches behind his brush mustache—facial hair of such heft and dimension that Rye half expected it to part and reveal Ursula the Great singing to a live cougar.

“Walsh,” he rumbled.

Rye could do nothing but point through the open double doors to the office at the other end of the meeting hall.

Sullivan dug in his pocket for a nickel, slapped it on the newsstand, and grabbed a copy of the Industrial Worker. He folded the paper and, with the headline FREE SPEECH DAY peeking out from under his heavy coat, marched through the double doors into the meeting hall. Rye had heard stories about the big chief, but he’d never seen the man up close. He walked with a rolling hitch, like he was mounted on his own hips, and the way his feet pointed out and his eyes bulged, you might think him awkward, but Rye knew the man’s reputation with a stick—you did well to avoid his shadow on the street.

In the meeting hall, a dozen pairs of eyes followed Sullivan as he strode down the center aisle until he got to the stage, where another man pointed left, toward the office door. The police chief pivoted and covered the distance in three steps, rapped with a knuckle, and honked again: “Walsh!” The office door opened, Sullivan went inside, the door closed, and a dozen tramps exhaled at the same time.

Rye took a seat between Early and Jules, who were finishing their coffee. The three of them watched as Gig and two other Wobblies stood in the aisle, debating the nature of the police chief. One man said Sullivan showed courage coming in without a bunch of other cops. Another said Sullivan would “smack your ass and drive you from town himself.” Still, he said, he preferred Sullivan to a cop like Hub Clegg, who “knocks you down to go through your pockets.”

“Sullivan’s character is beside the point,” Gig said. “He runs that brutal police department, ergo, failing to hold him to account for that outfit’s rank corruption is like believing the snake’s head ignorant of what happens to the rat it swallows.”

Early and Jules turned and