The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 18
“Well. Get off before Spokane,” the man said. He’d been arrested in Spokane and said the cops went hard on vagrants there. He was rolled, robbed, and knocked around for a week in a windowless cell, then, without a court hearing, one morning was simply dragged to the edge of town and dumped on the tracks by a cop who said he’d end up in the river if he ever came back. “It’s where I lost this.” He pointed to the scarred, flattened eyelid. “Get off before Spokane,” he said again. “The tracks keep going, but there’s nothing west of dead.”
Rye thought of the old man’s warning as he was shackled and duckwalked toward the Spokane jail. There were six of them in his line and other shackled prisoners sitting in the street or already locked up. Even with his aching back and arms, and the fingers on his right hand swollen and bruised where he’d blocked a blow, Rye had gotten off easy. The Italian singer had it the worst, whistling mists of blood through his battered mouth and nose. “That was good,” Rye said to the singer, remembering Mrs. Ricci at Mass one day, “Bel canto.”
“Thank you,” the Italian rasped.
Gig was at the front of the line and kept trying to look back at Rye, but the cop in front rapped his shoulder. “Eyes ahead!” The riot was breaking up behind them, but a few people still catcalled the prisoners as they were led down Stevens.
They passed the ornate five-story city hall and saw faces staring down from its towered and arched windows. The jail was just around the corner, along the river, a stone building with barred windows on the first and second floors. Next door, three firemen stood smoking and leaning on a new truck, watching the shackled prisoners waddle past.
At the jail, they were led into a small booking area, and a harried jailer came from behind the counter to look them over. “Goddamn Wobs,” he said in a brogue that made Sullivan’s sound like the king’s English. Then he went down the line. “Nem?” he said. And “Edge?” When he was done, he gave a jagged smile. “Well, look at what you coonts have done now, fooked your own bloody arseholes.”
Rye caught Gig’s eye. His cheek was bruising up a dark purple and he shook his head and frowned. Rye looked away.
Three more jailers came into the holding area, one of them a man in round eyeglasses who seemed to be in charge. Another unshackled them and patted them down for weapons. He made a pile of belongings: coats and money and paper and pocketknives and cigarettes and any other worthless thing they carried. The Irish one kicked through the swag, picked out a few coins, but shook his head in disappointment at the rest. “Fookin’ rubbish, is it?”
The head jailer looked down at the list of names and ages and then over the rims of his eyeglasses. “Where’s Gregory Dolan?”
Gig raised his hand unsteadily.
“This one’s strike committee,” the head jailer said. “C block.”
“Wait,” Rye said. “Can’t I go with my brother?”
This brought laughter from the Irish jailer, who gave Gig a shot in the back with his stick and pushed him through an open door.
When that door closed on his brother’s back, Rye found himself really afraid for the first time: What have I done?
The head jailer looked up. “Gentlemen. As our good rooms are taken by your fellow Wobs, you get the pen tonight.”
They were led down a back wooden staircase to a basement with nothing but a single holding cell, something left over from frontier times. There was one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and, next to it, a pipe with an open valve spewing steam down onto what looked like fifteen men already packed into an eight-foot-by-seven-foot cell.
“Please! I’m sick!” a man cried out from inside, and then others began yelling, too, for water, to go to the toilet, until the Irish jailor raked his nightstick across the bars, rapping fingers. “Shut your fookin’ traps!”
Rye couldn’t believe it when the jailer with glasses put a key in the cell door and unlocked it. He meant to put them . . . in there? Where? Another jailer jabbed at the wall of bums with his nightstick and gestured at Rye and the others to go in. “You Wobs wanted to pack the jail—here you go.”
Rye was pushed inside and pressed between three men, the stench bringing tears to his eyes. There were no sounds but breathing and moaning, and minutes seemed to take hours. At some point, three more men were shoved into the cell, and then two more. “Twenty-six,” the jailer said proudly, but inside was a mass fever, the bulb went out and it was windowless basement dark, that pipe hissing steam all night, the smell of vomit and piss, time measured in pain and stench and thirst—then someone would snap and the others would subdue him, for the struggle hurt them all—knees and elbows and fists and rising panic. Then the basement door opened and a bit of stairwell light flooded in, men crying out that they had to piss or were sick, but two cops and two jailers clopped down the stairs, drunk and laughing. “We’re going for the record!” one said, and two more Wobblies were somehow jammed into the cell, cops and jailers throwing their full weight against the door just to get it closed on the crush of men, Rye mashed between stinking flesh and iron bar, and all around him, whimpering and moaning and gulping, as if they were drowning in rotten flesh, and someone near him passed out, but the man just hung there between the bodies, nowhere to fall. “Hold the line!” a man called from somewhere in their