“Wait, sure,” said Vera. “I know you.” She freshened her smile, making it friendly again. In that instant he felt he could never act again unless she was acting with him. “Don’t I? Weren’t you in the papers a while back?”
Swanson snorted. “Nope. Not that type.”
Charles remembered several articles in the Bulletin that Father had put under his nose over a hundred breakfasts, having to do with abuses committed by private detectives. He continued to stare with a thrillingly detached, level cool — encouraged wildly by his perception of Vera’s similar condition — at Swanson.
“What type are you?” asked Vera.
“Say, you some kind of detective, little girl?” Swanson winked at Minkowski, who was black in the face with rage.
“Who,” asked Vera, “did you say you worked for?”
“I insist you tell me who you are before I start repeating myself!” chuckled Swanson.
“Aren’t you that famous detective? The one that beat up that fellow in the hotel room in where was it?”
“Oh my goodness!” shouted Swanson. “Certainly not!”
“It must have been that business in Stockton, then, the uh. oh, let me see, let me see now, the ummm—”
“Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association,” Charles said, drawing on resources he’d not had to measure or verify before speaking as casually as if the subject were baseball and the consequences for error nothing more serious than a corrective wisecrack — or lines in a play. “You played for them couple years ago,” he went on, as everybody ceased what they’d been doing in the scene to stare at him in astonishment. “The, uh, the sheriff there arrested a fellow who’d been, what, attempting to plant dynamite, wasn’t it? In the Sperry Flour Mill? If I’m remembering this right, and I sure could be wrong, don’t quote me — and in the lobby of the Stockton Hotel.?”
“Yes!” said Vera, “that’s right, and the Stockton Iron Mill and a couple other places but the sheriff—” she paused to feign a giggle behind her hand, “—the sheriff figures he’s got some kind of anarchist for sure, couldn’t be happier, couldn’t be more proud, you know, and then he finds out to his horror that the man is in fact a detective’s assistant in the employ of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association! That wasn’t you? I mean the detective, of course, not the knucklehead assistant.” Vera smiled coyly.
“I’ll tell you what,” grinned Swanson, “you’re one well-informed goddamn little schoolgirl.”
“I’ll tell you what, Mr. Swanson, I’m not a goddamn little schoolgirl. I’m a citizen of the United States of America and I like to read the newspapers, I like to read them all, you know, and the fine print too, just to make sure everybody’s getting a fair shake.”
“Fair shake! Hear that?” Swanson addressed his question to Minkowski. “Fair shake? I don’t — a fair shake, you say. I don’t think so. Not in this world. I mean, really, come now. If you aren’t a little schoolgirl, you’re sure acting like one!” He laughed good-naturedly. “The last thing this world is is fair. You just have to get over that! Find out how things go in a general sort of way, and then do like most everybody else does. But a fair shake now, isn’t that a newspaper itself? Kind our friend the driver here likes to peruse? Get all squinty-eyed and black-furrowed over? I read those rags too. Don’t I?” he asked Minkowski, who turned away, started his motor and revved it angrily — probably doing it some damage, Charles thought: settle down, don’t let him get to you.
“How ’bout you, Mr. Minot?”
Minkowski let his motor fall to idle and Charles took a slow, deep breath. He was known, after all, to this disgusting and dangerous man, and was now not at all sure what that knowledge meant. He glanced at Vera, who glanced back as if she thought he was forgetting his lines, and smiled discreet encouragement.
“Mr. Swanson?” Charles began.
Swanson interrupted him. “The Alarm and Forward and on and on — what else? Backward? I read this guy Berkman’s paper. Tries to assassinate Frick back in Homestead, goes to jail, gets out, comes here, an anarchist, mind you, a murdering godless fucking anarchist — excuse me, miss — and he starts a paper called the Blast. Hard to take a guy like that seriously, you know what I mean? But what are some other newspapers? This is fun, help me out. You must get around, Mr. Minot. Cronaca Sovversiva and Broyt un Frayhayt, there’s two more.” His pronunciation of the Italian and the Yiddish was faultless. Then he mispronounced them, as if having fun.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” Charles said. “Those are all foreign-language newspapers, aren’t they? I was brought up to read the newspapers of Christian white men.”
“Now there you go, that’s it, exactly!” Swanson’s slitted eyes grew horribly wide again, and his wide red mouth opened with amused pleasure. “Foreign nationals behind every one of ’em! It’s not American radicalism at all!” He suddenly pulled a wad of bills from an inside coat pocket. “Here’s the five thousand I promised you,” he stage-whispered, holding the money out to Minkowski, who reached for it. Swanson withdrew it slightly, waving it back and forth. “Just promise me again you’ll do what I asked you.”
“Give me the money you fucking asshole and we’ll see what happens,” said Minkowski genially.
Swanson laughed, stopped, then laughed again, and it seemed like the thing to do. It was infectious and effectively handed, Charles saw, the stage back to the strange detective, who was getting something like applause somewhere in his perception of the interior of the bus. He laughed a little longer, enjoying it clearly, then waved good-bye as he stepped from the bus and almost instantly disappeared into the crowd. Just as they were exhaling, he scared them all by appearing at Vera’s open window.
“I know what you’d do, miss,” he said, “with five grand.”
“You do?” she giggled.
“Climb up the tallest building in the city and put one of those electric signs up, like your friend did in New York a few years back, way up there on the top of that tower over, uh, over the uh. Madison Square Garden, jeepers, how I lose a name like that beats me! At the feet of lovely Diana, that big old naked lady who spins around like a weather vane.”
Minkowski engaged first gear and jumped away from the curb.
Charles saw it: the faint red letters, hundreds of feet up in the murky night, coming down Lexington from the Armory Show and all its insane new art, hoping to catch the first performance of the pageant of the striking Paterson Silk Workers at the Garden, turning on Twenty-Sixth, and seeing it over the treetops of Madison Square Park, floating in complete cloudy darkness above the feeble gaslight of the streets, as if written in fire that had burned itself down to embers — this was the work of someone Vera knew? He had been there — of course he’d been there! And had Vera not seen them? He thought she had.
He could not get the picture out of his mind. 1913. Alexander was already the governor’s chief of staff in Sacramento, and Andrew was figuring out what do in the wake of the humiliating Bull Moose defeat — not to mention the attempt by Schrank on the former president’s life: had the attempt been made in California, it might have occurred to Andrew to protect “Uncle Ted,” and gunshots had always sobered the family in ways gunshots did not ordinarily sober people — e.g., by seeking cover, either physical or psychological, panting, giving thanks to God Almighty that they were still alive, committing themselves to kindness and gentleness for the rest of their days, or casting about hysterically for a weapon to call their own. No, the Minots had, rather like T. R. himself, received gunshots and other potentially mortal wounds as signs from God that they had been chosen for great work. Charles had several semesters at Cal under his belt, was restless, and of course, while they were ascertaining the nature of the next bit of great work, they had come across the country to see the Armory Show!