The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 46
Rye turned the key and slid inside the door. A man was sitting on his bed.
“Who are you?” Rye asked.
He was an older man, sixty at least, in a gray tweed coat and trousers, with a great flourish of a tie. But it was his red, veined nose that drew Rye’s eye, and he recognized him as the man from the drugstore.
“How was your ice cream, Mr. Dolan? To your satisfaction, I hope?” He spoke with the western remnants of a British accent, like something fancy covered in dust. Rye remembered the voice from the train seat behind him when they’d arrived in Seattle, pointing out the window at men blasting away Denny Hill.
“Who are you?” Rye repeated.
“I’ve been sent to collect the debt you owe Mr. Brand.”
Rye was confused. “He wants his twenty dollars back?”
The man laughed. “No. He does not want his twenty dollars back.”
None of it made sense to Rye. “Who are you?” he asked a third time.
“Oh yes, forgive me, where are my manners?” The man stood and removed his hat and held out his hand. “My name is—”
Del Dalveaux
SPOKANE GAVE me the morbs. Right blood blister of a town. Six-month millionaires and skunk-hobos, and none in between, Spokane a gilded carriage passing by peasants bathing in the very river they shat in.
Last place I wanted to go, but the job was the job, so I packed three shirts and lingered a minute over which barking iron to take (in the end I went small, loud, and kicky, the .32 Savage automatic). I caught first-class Denver to Billings, my first day sober in a month spent crossing Montana, then two hours over the Idaho panhandle toward the Washington border, and that’s when the old morbid voice rattled up: Careful, Del—
At Hope, I slipped the porter a buck for a whiskey, then another when the train slowed the last five miles, forest, foothills, farms, and finally, Spokane.
I couldn’t believe how the syphilitic town had metastasized. Smoke seeped from twenty thousand chimneys, pillars to an endless gray ceiling. The city was twice the size of the last time I’d hated being there. A box of misery spilled over the whole river valley.
I was half rats by the time we settled in the station. The voice again: Go home, Del. You don’t need this. But my doctor wasn’t likely to take reputation as payment. You can do this, I said back. Ten years a Pinkerton, ten more with Allied, and twenty a freelance, I had survived worse.
And money was good. The kind of money I hadn’t seen since the mining wars, this Brand offering me prime pay (Dear Detective Dalveaux, My associates and I would like to inquire . . . ) and a bit of my old station in the letter, but also I suspected the job lived on the outskirts of what I was willing to do—and I’d done plenty: undercover with the Molly Maguires in my youth and the unionists in middle age. I had broke, beat, and buried men.
Spokane had a fancy new train station since I’d been through, built on an island just this side of the falls, three stories of brick and optimism. On the platform, I made the mistake of looking up, and a ripe ass told me I was gazing upon the biggest clock west of Chicago, 155 feet tall with four nine-foot faces. The ripe ass also said Spokane had the biggest beer hall and the biggest theater stage in the world, and I fancied shooting him in the teeth if he didn’t shut up. I can suffer any fool, but a booster turns my guts.
“You know what else you should see while you’re here?” he said.
“Is it only you,” I said, “or is every man in this town an insufferable cunt?”
Before he could answer, a thick lug in a driver’s cap stepped forward from a line of porters. Stared at my nose. A lot of things a man can hide, but not that grog-blossom map of life. “Mr. Dalveaux? Please follow me, sir.”
I stepped after the driver, but I noticed his socks were silk. His arm swung cuff links. Good Christ, this tiresome business. A fancy monger pretending to be his own driver, cap and all, reaching for the bags like a servant.
How to play it? Get rumbumptious or let him have his fun? I went down the middle, didn’t want him to play me, but didn’t want him canked yet, either: “Thank you, Mr. Brand,” I said, and he looked surprised over his shoulder. I liked the defeat on his face—his racket was queered and he was stuck carrying my bags. How’s that for a red nose, muffinguts? He muttered some rot about safety and anonymity, but I could tell he’d just wanted to reveal himself like a posh magician—Look, it is I, Lemuel Brand!
We were followed by his security lug, who climbed in a tail car. Brand and I settled in a big touring auto—him driving us into that hopeful downtown, past a curling streetcar packed with people, hutching wagons and sputtering Tin Lizzies, much more traffic than last time, on suspiciously wide streets up a hill to a big gaudy house overlooking his rank kingdom.
He laid out a whole speech in the car: “city on the verge of—dangers of socialism—East Coast agitators—immigrant filth—concerned mine owners and business leaders—real Americans—jail full of vermin—mayor’s hands tied—in support of police—moral responsibility—commercial interests—future in the balance—last stand of decency—”
“And is that why you brought me here, Mr. Brand? My decency?”
He looked over. Did not so much as smile.
We parked and got out of the touring. The security brute climbed out of the follow car and gave me the old agency-man once-over. I opened my coat to show my gun so the lug wouldn’t feel the