More pop-pop-pops went off, incongruously cheerful. Maria's shriek was louder than her sister's. She couldn't even run to Angelina; the crowd, panicked by gunfire, swept them apart. When Maria tried to go against it, she was swept off her own feet. Flora dragged her up before she could get too badly trampled, then dragged her away.
Clinging to each other, weeping, the two of them struggled to get off Broadway and onto Twenty-third Street so they could escape the riot. "Oof!" A portly man ran into Flora. He acted as if he were trying to fend her off, but his hands slid up her body till they closed on her breasts, the crowd and turmoil offering concealment for what he did. She'd had such unwelcome attentions before. Snatching a pin from the floral hat she wore, she stuck him with it. He howled and whirled away. She stuck him again as he fled, this time where he sat down. He howled again, almost seeming to levitate. The pin was long and sharp and had blood on a good part of its length. Savagely pleased at that, she stuck it back amidst the artificial greenery on her hat.
Maria Tresca didn't react, staring numbly. Maybe she was too numb to think too much about Angelina yet.
"It would be better if they knew not to do such things," Flora said, not wanting to think about Angelina, either, "but we have to educate them if they don't."
She wished her sister had stuck a hat pin in Yossel Reisen. But no, that wasn't fair. He hadn't taken anything from Sophie she hadn't wanted to give. It was only what he'd given her in return…
A man stepped on her foot. He didn't try to feel her up; he just went on his way as if she didn't exist. That she didn't mind so much; it could have happened at any time in the streets of New York City, the biggest, most indifferent city in the USA. In a way, in fact, it almost comforted her, showing the world wasn't devoid of normality even in the midst of riot.
Off Broadway, things were quieter. Flora and Maria walked quickly down Twenty-third Street, to put some distance between themselves and the insanity that had swallowed the Soldiers' Circle parade.
"Trouble will come from this," Flora said grimly, and then amended that: "More trouble, I mean." Back behind them, Angelina was almost surely dead.
Even as Maria nodded, tears streaming down her face, a burly policeman grabbed a Jewish-looking fellow in a shabby suit and demanded, "You wouldn't be a Socialist, would you now?" When the man nodded, the policeman hit him in the head with his billy club. Blood streaming down his face, the fellow turned to run. The policeman kicked him in the seat of the pants, shouting, "Lucky I don't shoot you, you black-hearted traitor!"
"Shame!" Flora cried, and Maria added her voice an instant later. Flora went on, "You have no business beating a man for what he believes, only for what he does. Haven't you heard of the Constitution of the United States?" Yes, thinking of politics was easier than thinking of death unleashed on the streets of New York.
The policeman stamped toward her and Maria, nightstick still upraised. To Flora's relief, at the last moment he discovered he didn't quite have the crust to beat two women. Voice strangled with rage, he said, "Get out o' here this minute, or I'll run the both of you in."
"On what charge?" Flora asked, her chin jutting in defiance.
"Streetwalking." The policeman stripped her and Maria with his eyes.
"We're not the ones who sell ourselves to get our daily bread," Flora retorted.
"Get out!" the policeman screamed. His face was crimson, furious. He spat on the sidewalk. "And that for the God-damned Constitution of the United States. There's a war on now, and the gloves are off. Get out!"
He would have hit them had they stayed an instant longer. Flora was willing to suffer a beating for the cause, but now Maria dragged her away. "We can't," the secretary said. "Enough blood spilled already. Please, Flora-not after Angelina."
Later, Flora decided the secretary was right; the Socialists already had martyrs aplenty today, Maria Tresca's sister among them. The policeman's hate-filled words kept ringing in her ears. The gloves are off. She shivered. If TR felt the same way-and he probably would-what was the government going to do now?
A Negro maid lifted her feather duster from the windowsill-not that she'd been working hard anyhow, but an excuse to stop was always welcome-in one of the forward-facing rooms at Marshlands and said to Scipio, "Here come de man from de Mercury wid a paper for we."
"Thank you very much, Griselda," he answered gravely, and heard her snicker by way of reply. He ignored her amused scorn; so long as he was on duty in the mansion, he was obliged to sound like an educated white man, not a Negro of the Congaree.
He checked for himself before going to the front hall to open the door; the rest of the staff was not above playing small jokes. But, sure enough, here came Virgil Hobson on a mule, carrying with him a copy of the Charleston Mercury. Anne Colleton got the Daily Courier, too, and the South Carolinian and Southern Guardian from Columbia. Marshlands was a good way out of the way for all of them, but you declined to render its mistress a service at your peril.
Virgil was just climbing down off the mule as Scipio opened the door for him. "Good afternoon, sir," he said. Hobson was a poor buckra who spent half his time drinking and the other half hung over, but he was white folks- and the white folks who didn't deserve respect raised the most hell if they didn't get it.
"Afternoon," Virgil said. He walked straight, but very gently, as if touching the ground hurt. That meant he was after a binge, not in the middle of one. He thrust the Mercury at Scipio. "Here y'are." Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked back toward his long-eared mount.
"Thank you, sir," Scipio said to his back. He waited till the delivery man rode away before shutting the door. As he set the newspaper on the tray to take it to Anne Colleton, he glanced down at the front page.
Big black headlines shouted up at him: SOCIALISTS AND MORMONS RAM PAGE IN NEW YORK CITY! REDS AND FANATICS RIOT, FORCE YANKS TO DECLARE MARTIAL LAW! UNREST IN U.S. ARMY REPORTED.
He didn't know how the Mercury had got the story or how much truth was in it, but if it was even a quarter true, the USA was in a peck of trouble.
On reading past the headlines, the other thing he noted, less happily, was that the U.S. Army, despite the claims of unrest in its ranks, was going about the business of keeping a lid on New York City. The people they were putting a lid on might be Socialists, but they were white folks. If damnyankee soldiers would put down an uprising from white folks, what would Confederate troops do if- when- their Negro labourers rose up under the red flag?
He was afraid he knew the answer to that question. He'd tried telling it to the Reds among the field hands here. They kept laughing at him. He resolved to hang on to this newspaper and the others that came in over the next few days, to let Cassius and his fellow revolutionaries see what happened in the real world. How could you expect a band of Marxist fanatics to seize power in a country? They didn't seem to understand how big a place a country was.
Going on with that argument, fortunately, could wait. He carried the Charleston Mercury upstairs to Anne Colleton's office: of an afternoon, you could expect to find her there. She was on the telephone. He stood in the doorway, waiting to be noticed.
"No," she said crisply into the mouthpiece. "I told you to buy, not sell. You shall carry out my instructions as I give them, sir, or I will find another broker and you will find a lawsuit… What?… An oversight? I have no more tolerance for oversights than I have for deliberate errors. Whatever it was, this is your first, last, and only warning. Good day." She hung up, muttered something sulphurous under her breath, and then, anger expunged, smiled at Scipio. "I hope you have better news for me than that chucklehead did."