The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 90

There were satchels with bombs in them. People would be killed. Innocent people, maybe. Clegg and Lem Brand, I bore them as much ill will as one human could bear another, but there was no guarantee someone else wouldn’t get hurt, too. Early kept saying this was a message we were delivering, that things were broken, that this was the only way to fix it, that we weren’t delivering bombs but ideas.

You’re fooling yourself, I thought as I lay there, trying to sleep in the front room of that little blockhouse. You aren’t some actor, some learned man. Some kind of traveling philosopher.

This is what you are.

My last thoughts before sleep were about you, Rye-boy. I became rather melancholy, worried that I would never see my brother again. And the hardest part was knowing it was the best thing for you.

We rose quietly Monday morning in that little house, everyone alone with his thoughts except Miller, who whistled cheerfully. We all dressed plainly except Everett, who put on his porter outfit.

At nine, Early and I drove Miller to the train station and Everett to a café across the street, where he would eat his breakfast with the first satchel. Everett had just jumped out of the car when Early thought of something and chased him down with some last-minute instructions. He came back to the car. “I forgot to give him the key.”

After breakfast, Everett would deliver Clegg’s case to the police department, the key sealed in an envelope with Clegg’s name on it. The case would hopefully sit under the night sergeant’s desk until he started his shift in the afternoon. After Everett had delivered that first case, he would meet Early and me at the county courthouse at eleven-thirty, and we would give him the second case, which he would deliver to Lem Brand at the Spokane Club, where one of the waiters had told Everett that Brand ate lunch every weekday at two p.m.

Everett would then go back to the train station, where Miller would be waiting with a change of clothes and a ticket for him. Everett would change and he and Miller would leave on trains in opposite directions. Early and I would head west in the Ford. If all went well, we’d be long gone by midafternoon, when the cases were opened.

Back at the house, Early grabbed the second satchel and placed it gently in the backseat. I smoked as far from the Ford as I could get, while Early cleared the shop and the bunkhouse of any signs that we had been there. He burned our garbage in the woodstove, and I watched the gray smoke roll out into the sky. It was one of those startlingly clear days for February, cold endless blue.

I filled the Ford’s tank with enough gas to get us back to Lind, and filled two more gas cans in case we needed to drive farther. I put our packs in the backseat, between the gas cans and the satchel.

“It’d be a good day to not crash this machine,” Early said. I cranked the Lizzy and climbed in. A northeasterly had blown into the valley, and gusts rocked us as I drove toward downtown. “Watch the bumps,” Early said, and he checked his pocket watch. Eleven. The first satchel would have just been delivered.

We drove past the train station. If there was any problem, Miller was supposed to be standing outside. But he wasn’t there. I drove up Howard Street, past taverns and theaters, and although it was a quiet morning, it made me think of Ursula and wild old Spokane.

I thought of you, too, Rye-boy, and I wished I’d gone to see you once more, to apologize for the way I was after I got out of jail. These last days, I wanted to say goodbye. You’d be working up at the machine shop all day. Even if the cops figured out I was involved, there’d be no way to tie you to it. And then, when things calmed down, six months, a year from now, maybe I could come back. Maybe Early and I would have outlawed our way to such wealth that I could buy that little orchard behind Mrs. Ricci’s house for us. Or hell, maybe I’d buy her whole block.

At Riverside, we turned west, pausing for a horse and carriage. Early tipped his hat to two women waiting on the corner. They smiled and I wished I had a minute to get out of the car and charm them up in my old manner.

“Take Monroe,” Early said.

The Monroe Street Bridge was a high steel span on the west side of downtown, crossing the deepest part of the two-hundred-foot gorge, just past the waterfalls. The deck was strung with power lines, and down the center ran two sets of streetcar tracks. It was a swaying, shaking old bridge that the city was planning to replace in the spring with a new concrete span. We rattled across it and landed on the north side of the river, the massive Spokane County Courthouse rising on our left. It looked like a French castle, cream brick, with a dozen spires rising from its red gabled roofs and, in the center, a 120-foot tower with American and state flags on top. It always looked so out of place across from downtown, alone on that north bank like the citadel of some neighboring kingdom.

Early had me cross the railroad tracks and drive past the courthouse once, then around back, while he checked things out. We came up from the south and idled on Madison, a tree-lined road across from the front of the courthouse. I pulled in under a bare maple. I looked around for Everett but didn’t see him.

There was a commotion outside: maybe three dozen people milling about, newspaper reporters and photographers, protestors with placards. Must have been why Early chose this place—it was a circus—the end