The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 69

This cut me, as he must’ve known it would, and I felt even greater shame at the sharpness of it. He’d found the spot that stung, the romantic girl who once rode toward dragons with her prince. He had not come from Butte. Three weeks I had been here and nothing. Not so much as a letter.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe. And then I could.

“My husband has nothing to do with this,” I said. “Just as whatever poor girl you have enslaved back at your stove has nothing to do with your rank corruption. As for ‘whore’s spectacle,’ ask your wife what bargains she made to live in your house, Acting Chief Sullivan.”

A storm went over his face, and then a surprising vulnerability.

But I was not done. “And when your pretty wife answers, watch her eyes closely, because whatever she says, there will be another truth she won’t speak, for fear of breaking her acting husband’s fragile heart.”

Sullivan straightened. “Take this trash to her cell.”

My anger had dissipated, and with it, hope. I lay back on the cot in my jail cell. I could not sleep. The only light came from the small barred windows. The breathing of the older woman in the cell was labored, and as soon as the door closed, I began to hear the scurrying down the hall of large, industrious rats.

There were faint voices, too, men’s laughter, the opening and closing of cell doors. I thought of Chief Sullivan and of Jack. Why hadn’t Jack come?

The saloon girls snored beneath their thin blankets.

And then, at some point in the night, the heavy door pushed open and a man with a gas lantern came in. It was a new jailer, one who hadn’t been on the earlier shift, a man with gray teeth and a patchy beard that covered his cheeks.

“Who’s up?” He held his lantern over me. “This one?”

“Not for that,” said Katya, the younger girl, with the accent. “Leave her alone.” She rose with a sigh.

This repeated three more times, like an uneasy dream. The heavy jail door would open, and the gray-toothed jailer would come in and take one of the women away. “Sweetheart’s here,” he said to the unfriendly one. She rose without making a sound and, twenty minutes later, plopped back down on her cot.

“Sweetheart’s here,” the man would say again, and now Katya rose with a deep sigh, left, and returned half an hour later.

At some point, I must have slept, for at dawn I woke to find a different jailer sitting on my bed, a younger man, his hand on my cheek. “Cold, are you?”

I sat up straight. I had two blankets on.

“Leave her be!” said Katya, who must have put her blanket on me after I went to sleep. She rose and walked over. “I am coming.”

It was almost an hour before the jailer brought Katya back. She carried two pieces of stale bread and two cups of coffee. I sat up and she gave me one of the measly breakfasts. The jailer brought another hunk of bread and a cup of coffee for the quiet woman in our cell, but she faced the wall, her back to him. “Hey,” he said, and when she didn’t budge, he set the coffee and bread on the ground in front of her.

I sipped the cool, oily coffee and gnawed at the hard bread.

“When will your baby come?” Katya asked.

I looked down at my belly, surprised each day by how evident my condition was becoming. “April, hopefully,” I said. “I lost a baby last year, so . . . I don’t know.”

“Lost a baby.” She looked me up and down. “Lost a baby,” she repeated in a singsong way, as if trying to place the phrase. “Lost.” Up close, she was thin, with black hair and lovely pale skin. Her eyes were dark and mirthful. “You have choose a name for baby?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“After your husband if a boy? Or your father?”

“I hadn’t thought of it.”

“My father’s name. It is Oleksander. You know this name?”

“Alexander,” I said. “Yes.”

“O-leksander,” she corrected. “Is very good name. Very strong for boy.”

“You should take this back,” I said, and I handed her the blanket.

“No, please,” she said. “You.” And I could tell it meant something to her, that I use the blanket.

“Thank you,” I said. “Can I ask you—last night, is it always like that?”

She shrugged. “Is here, is there, is same, yes? Different boss but same.” She held up the bread. “Food is worse.”

The other woman had stirred, and she cleared her throat as she rose. “I swear to God, if you say another word about it, Katya—”

“Be quiet, cow,” Katya muttered.

The other woman sat up now. “You’re gonna get us killed.” She took a drink of the coffee and stood. She shook her head. “Christ’s sake, you two.” She walked to the corner of the cell, raised her skirts, and squatted over a bucket in the corner.

Katya patted my arm and stood to return to her own bunk. “Oleksander,” she said quietly. “Very strong name.”

By the time of my arraignment that morning, Fred Moore had done champion lawyer work. The newsboys—after four hours of threats and questioning by the police—had been released to parents and orphanages. No charges had been filed against the old cook. “Not unless the state plans to charge him for dry pie crust,” Fred said. Only Charlie Filigno and I were being held, on conspiracy charges.

Fred said he’d gone around town all night trying to raise the money to bail me out. He’d approached the other labor leaders—AFL, WFM, even the porters’ union, but everyone had told him no. One man had said that he would, but his wife found me indecent. Instead, the entire six hundred dollars—against an outrageous bond of six thousand—came from a single woman of means, the wife of a wealthy doctor in town. I recalled meeting her at