The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 101

The money. Right. For a year, five thousand dollars had sat in an envelope under my mattress. I hadn’t spent a dime of it. Most days I forgot it was there.

“Of course,” I said. “You can have it all.”

“No!” he said, and his face flushed. “One or two hundred would be fine. Just enough to get me staked up there.”

“I don’t want it, Willard,” I said. “Where that money came from, what happened—I don’t want it.”

“Listen to me,” he said, “it’s just money. It’s as good or as bad as what you do with it. And whatever you do, Rye, it’ll be better than Brand having it.”

That night he met me at Mrs. Ricci’s house, and after much convincing, he agreed to take five hundred-dollar bills. I took them out of the envelope and handed them over. He folded them, his hands shaking, and put them in his pocket. “You have to promise me you’ll do something with the rest of it,” he said.

I promised.

He shifted his weight on the porch. “I said that Brand was unwell. He’s actually in a sanitarium, babbling like a lunatic. He’s convinced Early Reston is still out there and coming for him.”

My mouth went dry, and I told him that when Sullivan was killed, I’d had the same thought.

“No,” Willard said, “come on. You saw that wreck. Nobody could’ve survived that.” But Willard wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I could see even he wasn’t entirely convinced.

It was thirteen years later, in 1924, that the police announced they’d finally solved John Sullivan’s murder. I was married by then, with three little kids at home. It had been years since I’d even thought of the big police chief.

I gasped when I saw the story in the paper. A woman in Alabama had killed her husband in self-defense, and when the police arrested her, she said that he had been a drifter and outlaw who’d worked out west in the mines and had fallen in with anarchists. He’d told her that he’d killed dozens of people out there, including a police officer somewhere in the west, Spokane or Seattle, she thought.

The man’s name was Victor Claude Miller. I stared at his picture. It didn’t look like Early Reston. But how could I be sure? By that time, Early wasn’t so much a man anyway, but a shadow in my worst dreams.

Not long after Willard left, I sent Mrs. Ricci’s son Marco a letter, offering him five hundred dollars for his father’s old orchard.

He drove up two days later and we sat at the kitchen table. “You don’t have that kind of money,” he said.

“I inherited it,” I said.

“From who?”

“My uncle Willard.” I reached in my pocket and set the five hundred dollars on the table.

He stared at the money. “We’ll need a lawyer to draw up papers.”

“Oh!” It dawned on me. “I have a lawyer.”

Marco looked as shocked by this as he had been by the five hundred dollars.

Two days later, Joe gave me the afternoon off, and I took the streetcar downtown to Mr. Moore’s office. He was happy to see me and said he couldn’t believe how much older I had gotten in just the year since Gurley’s trial.

“How is Elizabeth?” I asked.

“She’s fine,” he said. “Living in New York with her parents and her sisters, organizing garment workers there, of course.”

“And her husband?”

“She told him she wasn’t cut out to be a miner’s wife.” He smiled. “He tried to talk her out of it, but she went back to New York after the trial, filed for divorce, and is raising the baby herself.

“It was a rather bittersweet victory,” he said. “She missed seeing the results of it—the anti-speaking ordinance overturned, the police chief fired, the IWW prisoners released, nineteen of the worst employment agencies shut down.” He shook his head. “She did all of that. And she wasn’t here to see it.” But the success in Spokane had inspired other free speech actions, he said, in Fresno and in Los Angeles. He was leaving in two days to consult with the IWW in California.

“And the baby?”

For a moment, Mr. Moore seemed confused. “Oh, yes. A boy. Fred,” he added shyly. “She named him Fred.” He laughed, and then he wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. It was Gurley Flynn’s address.

“I don’t have the first idea what I’d write,” I said.

“She told me you were the one who got her story out,” Mr. Moore said, “that you took it to the Agitator in Seattle. I know she was quite moved by that, Ryan. She always believed, as I did, that you were a pawn in the other side’s treachery.”

I could think of nothing to do but nod.

“How’s your brother?” he asked.

My breath left, as it always did when someone asked about Gig. “He’s great,” I said. “Riding the rails, seeing the world.”

Mr. Moore was staring at me. “That’s who you look like,” he said. “I just realized it. You look like him.”

I smiled and cleared my throat. “I don’t know if you’re still my lawyer,” I said, “but I need a couple of things. And I can pay.”

I explained about drawing up the paperwork for buying Mrs. Ricci’s orchard. Then I put $505 on his desk. “Take your fees out of the five hundred and donate the rest to the IWW’s legal fund,” I said. “The other five dollars is for my dues. I never paid them.”

Mr. Moore just stared at the money. “Where—”

“Inherited it,” I said.

My next stop was the Phoenix Hotel. I hadn’t seen Ursula since the night I tried to find Gig, and I thought she should at least know what happened to him. A young man at the desk called the hotel manager, Edith, who excused herself to call Ursula. I sat in the lobby waiting.

After a moment, Edith came back. “One thing,” she said. “She doesn’t go by Ursula anymore. She performs under her real name, Margaret Burns.”

“Oh,”