The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 64

The doorman clapped his gloved hands and made a muffled sound. “Hey! You deaf? You can’t be on the sidewalk. No begging here.”

Rye looked down at his own icy red, calloused hands—pure rebuke, dead giveaway. “I’m not begging,” he said, “I’m just walking.”

“Then keep walking!” The man started toward Rye. “You can’t be here.”

“Where’d you get your gloves?”

“What?” The doorman gave Rye a shove, and he lurched into the street.

Rye sat down on the sidewalk and began unlacing his boot.

“Don’t do that, kid! Don’t make me call a cop.”

Rye reached in his sock and came out with Brand’s twenty-dollar bill. He’d carried it there for over two weeks, the safest bank in the world, a hobo’s sock. “I want to buy some gloves,” he said.

The doorman grabbed him by the collar, lifted him, and walked him to the end of the block. “I don’t care if you want to buy a Ford, you can’t do it on my curb.” He gave Rye another shove, pushing him down the block. “Now get, before I crack your head open. You’ll put people off their dinner.”

Rye staggered down the block, one boot untied, gripping that rank bill in his hand. It had been like an infection in there. He’d thought about donating it to Gurley’s bucket but hadn’t—thank goodness, or a thief in Taft would have it. It occurred to him that he’d kept it for another reason. He’d convinced himself that as long as he didn’t spend the bill, maybe he could deny what he’d done, betrayed his friends.

But he had betrayed them. He had told Lem Brand their plans, and in his Seattle hotel he’d answered Del Dalveaux’s questions: Where are you going next? Is Early Reston with you? He had betrayed them and then tried to convince himself that he hadn’t, or that it was harmless information, or that it was the only way to help Gig.

But it was a rock in his conscience, this twenty-dollar bill. And Gig was spending six months in jail anyway.

Rye stared at the wrinkled bill. A stray thought: If I spend this, I will no longer have it. This was the crazy thing about wealth: You only had it if you didn’t use it, but if you didn’t use it, there was no value in having it. It was like a riddle. No wonder some men died with more money than they could spend in a second life while other men starved. And him: a fool with twenty dollars and ice-cold hands.

He kept walking west, paying particular attention to the gloved hands of the men and women on the street, gesturing in conversation, climbing on streetcars, opening doors. Finally, he followed a man in a smart suit and warm gloves up a set of stone steps and straight into the dark wood door of a store called Bradley & Graham’s, Fine Clothing and Rich Furnishings.

It was a corner shop, warm and gently lit. Rye stood in the doorway, unable to move. An older man in a fine suit with a kerchief in his breast pocket looked up, smiled grimly, and began approaching, but before the man could speak, Rye held up the twenty-dollar note. He sputtered, “Gloves?”

The man looked down at Rye. His plain, thin suit coat, or rather, Fred Moore’s plain, thin suit coat, was dusty and worn from ten days on the road. It wouldn’t have come from a shop like this even when it was new, of course. And his once fine gray bowler had worn edges and a big grease stain on it. Still, that note in his hand was legal tender, and the salesman seemed perplexed by it. He was maybe sixty, with eyeglasses and a gray beard. He glanced down at the bill.

“It’s real,” Rye said.

“What’s your name, son?”

Rye answered, “Ryan Dolan, sir,” and wished he hadn’t added the sir.

“And what kind of gloves are you looking for?”

Rye considered again his red, stinging, work-scabbed hands, the mitts of a sixty-year-old man sewn to the arms of a boy. His clothes usually came from the Catholic charity bin or the Starvation Army, and he’d only ever bought one new item of clothing, a pair of warm socks from the bin at Murgittroyd’s. He could probably get a pair of gloves there for four bits. Or, if he was feeling fancy, go to the Emporium’s Saturday sale. One time he had walked into the Crescent, hoping to pinch a biscuit at the lunch counter, but a security guard had hustled him out. He wondered how much gloves were at the Crescent. Two bucks?

“Well,” he said finally, “the warm kind?”

“I could sell you a pair of ten-dollar ermine-lined gloves.” The man lowered his voice. “Or I could be a decent fellow and send you to Murgy’s, where you could find a pair almost as nice for under a dollar.”

Rye looked around again. He must be in the finest clothier in town. Rich men sat in velvet chairs while other men retrieved items for them. Here, they didn’t pick over bins for the things they wanted, but got served like guests in a restaurant. A handful of wooden dummies were dressed like they were attending a wedding. There were no prices on anything, no bins announcing six for a dollar, Rye guessing that if a man had to ask how much something cost here, he could not afford it.

He had a feeling similar to the one he’d experienced in Lem Brand’s house—despair that this world existed, and that, normally, he could no more afford one-dollar gloves than he could ten-dollar gloves. That nine dollars, like nine levels of class, existed between the very limit of what he could imagine and what men like Lem Brand bought without a second thought.

“Is that your most expensive pair, then, the ten-dollar jobs?” Rye asked.

“The ermine? No,” the salesman admitted. “The ermine comes from the stoat, a kind of