The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 93

he expected? Some kind of pageantry? He blamed Anna Pavlovna, Prince Andrey, the Rostovs. Now here he was, dressed in fancy new evening wear, with five thousand dollars in his breast pocket—what had Early said, Who are you? It was a fair question. He wondered what Gig would think of him now.

He looked for Willard in the crowd, or his Model T on the street, but didn’t see either. He followed some lawyers up the wide courthouse steps. His whole idea had been to come see Gurley on the day of her verdict, but this was all so much more elaborate than he’d imagined, like some kind of production he was attending, like Ursula the Great at the Comique. But if that was the case, who was the cougar?

Up the stairs and inside the courthouse, a uniformed cop was stopping everyone. He asked if Rye had credentials, and Rye said, “For what?” and the cop sent him down the hallway to stand with other hangers-on. Apparently, every seat in the courtroom had long ago been assigned. Rye had imagined this would be like his own courtroom appearance, with just a few onlookers, Mr. Moore, and the prosecutor, Fred Pugh. But the whole building was packed, corridors full of newspaper reporters and lawyers, unionists and curious people from all over the country. Rye found himself pushed to the end of a hallway with a group of lawyers around a spittoon, none of them with decent aim. A splatter of tobacco juice crossed the bow of one of Rye’s new shoes, and he dropped to wipe it away with his bare hand.

These lawyers were a scraggly bunch, reminding him of a pack of tramps around a cook fire. They were debating how badly the union was going to lose—six-month to one-year sentences the consensus, although a lawyer with a massive boiler of a gut said Pugh planned to argue that these were the masterminds of all the trouble and to seek exceptional sentences of five years. “The judge would have them drawn and quartered if the prosecutor could find a precedent,” he said.

One of the lawyers said that Gurley Flynn had succeeded in distracting from the state’s case, but the heavy lawyer leaned in and confided that it didn’t matter because Pugh’s own neighbor was the jury foreman “and he’s got no sympathy for unions, bums, foreigners, or wives who run out on husbands.” Another lawyer said Gurley had so angered the judge that the jury’s instructions had basically been about how far they could go in sentencing. The third lawyer pointed out that Pugh had won every case against the IWW this year and wasn’t likely to lose the biggest yet.

All of this angered Rye, and he had the urge to tell the spitting lawyers that Pugh hadn’t won them all, that Fred Moore had gotten at least one Wobbly out of jail, but he kept his tongue.

People moved in and out of the hall, but the cops wouldn’t let anyone go upstairs. They stood for over an hour, and then a commotion arose, people yelling from the floor above, newspapermen like birds startled off a wire. “A shocker!” someone yelled, although Rye couldn’t tell which way, someone yelling, “Guilty!” and someone else yelling, “Acquitted!” He tried to get closer but was pushed even farther back as the hall was filled by more reporters and onlookers, a sea of fedoras, and a cheer went up and then there was some angry yelling, and Rye might not have known what was happening except a newspaperman turned and yelled right into his face, “Filigno’s guilty, Gurley Flynn’s let go!”

Rye was pushed against the wall and he saw the prosecutor, Pugh, come down the staircase, red-faced and furious, chasing after a man in a gray suit. “You let the worst of them go free!” On the steps, a man who was apparently a juror turned to the prosecutor. “Aw, she ain’t a criminal, Fred. You want us to send some pretty Irish girl to jail for being bighearted and idealistic?”

There was more yelling, people pushing, and someone stomped on Rye’s new shoes, scuffing them. He stood at the end of the first-floor hallway for another half hour, with the lawyers chattering about this great upset—a defeat for the city, shame for the mayor and Police Chief Sullivan, who now could not ignore Gurley Flynn’s allegations about the jail.

Then, from down the hall, Rye saw Fred Moore descend the stairs, his arm around Gurley, who looked angry, nothing like a person who had just been acquitted. Rye was surprised at both how pregnant she was—her belly well out in front—and how small she seemed in the crowd around her. She was yelling back up the stairs to a scrum of reporters following her. “We should have both been convicted or both cleared!” She vowed to appeal, and at Rye’s end of the hall, the spittoon lawyers began debating whether a defendant could actually appeal her own acquittal.

“I don’t think that’s even possible,” one of them said.

“We are not done fighting for justice here!” Gurley yelled. “Nor am I done exposing the venal corruption of the police and prosecutors, and the millionaire mining concerns that own them!” At that, Mr. Moore pulled Gurley by the arm, and the whole spectacle moved down the steps and spilled out the doors.

Rye tried to follow, but people coming down the staircase kept pushing him farther away from Gurley and his old lawyer. He’d hoped to see her, to talk to her, to say, to say—

To say what?

In the commotion, his own thoughts froze him: What were you hoping to say? Rye stood stone-still in the swirling crowd. He had created a whole fantasy in his mind—her seeing him dressed like this, thanking him for delivering her story to the Agitator, for saving the movement. She would no longer see him as a mole and a traitor, a desperate, unsophisticated orphan bum, but as a man who had done the