Nathan Bishop slammed back the rest of his drink. He dropped the glass to the scarred wood table and looked around the bar, his eyes red and sharp.
In the heavy air that often followed one of Nathan’s tirades, Danny said nothing. He could feel the men at the nearest table shift in awkwardness. One of them suddenly began talking about Ruth, about the newest trade rumors. Nathan breathed heavily through his nostrils while he reached for the bottle and placed his cigarette between his lips. He got a shaky hand on the bottle. He poured himself another drink. He leaned back in his chair and flicked his thumbnail over a match and lit his cigarette.
“That’s what you can do,” he whispered.
In the Sowbelly Saloon, Danny tried to see through the crowd of Roxbury Letts to the back table where Louis Fraina sat tonight in a dark brown suit and a slim black tie sipping from a small glass of amber liquor. It was only the blaze of his eyes behind a pair of small round spectacles that gave him away as something other than a college professor who’d entered the wrong bar. That, and the deference the others showed him, placing his drink carefully on the table in front of him, asking him questions with the jutting chins of anxious children, checking to see whether he was watching when they expounded on a point. It was said that Fraina, Italian by birth, spoke Russian as close to fluently as could be asked of one not raised in the Motherland, an assessment rumored to have been first delivered by Trotsky himself. Fraina kept a black moleskin notebook open on the table in front of him, and he’d occasionally jot notes in it with a pencil or flip through the pages. He rarely looked up, and when he did, it was only to acknowledge a speaker’s point with a soft flick of his eyelids. Not once had he and Danny exchanged so much as a glance.
The other Letts, though, had finally stopped treating Danny with the amused politeness one reserved for children and the feeble-minded. He wouldn’t say they trusted him yet, but they were getting used to having him around.
Even so, they spoke in accents so thick they’d soon tire of conversation with him and jump ship as soon as another Lett interrupted in the mother tongue. That night, they had a full docket of problems and solutions that had carried over from the meeting into the bar.
Problem: The United States had launched a covert war against the provisional Bolshevik government of the new Russia. Wilson had authorized the detachment of the 339th, who’d joined up with British forces and seized the Russian port of Archangel on the White Sea. Hoping to cut the supplies of Lenin and Trotsky and starve them out during a long winter, the American and British forces were instead facing an early winter freeze and were rumored to be at the mercy of their White Russian allies, a corrupt group of warlords and tribal gangsters. This embarrassing quagmire was just one more instance of Western Capitalism attempting to crush the will of the great people’s movement.
Solution: Workers everywhere should unite and engage in civil unrest until the Americans and the British withdrew their troops.
Problem: The oppressed firemen and policemen of Montreal were being violently devalued by the state and stripped of their rights.
Solution: Until the Canadian government capitulated to the police and firemen and paid them a fair wage, workers everywhere should unite in civil unrest.
Problem: Revolution was in the air in Hungary and Bavaria and Greece and even France. In Germany, the Spartacists were moving on Berlin. In New York, the Harbor Workers Union had refused to report for duty, and across the country unions were warning of “No Beer, No Work” sit-downs if Prohibition became the law of the land.
Solution: In support of all these comrades, the workers of the world should unite in civil unrest.
Should.
Could.
Might.
No actual plans for revolution that Danny could hear. No specific plotting of the insurrectionary deed.
Just more drinking. More talk that turned into drunken shouts and shattered stools. And it wasn’t just the men shattering stools and shouting that night but the women as well, although it was often hard to tell them apart. The workers revolution had no place for the sexist caste system of the United Capitalist States of America — but most women in the bar were hard-faced and industrial-gray, as sexless in their coarse clothes and coarse accents as the men they called comrades. They were without humor (a common affliction among the Letts) and, worse, politically opposed to it — humor was seen as a sentimental disease, a by-product of romanticism, and romantic notions were just one more opiate the ruling class used to keep its masses from seeing the truth.
“Laugh all you want,” Hetta Losivich said that night. “Laugh so that you look like fools, like hyenas. And the industrialists will laugh at you because they have you exactly where they want you. Impotent. Laughing, but impotent.”
A brawny Estonian named Pyotr Glaviach slapped Danny on the shoulder. “Pampoolats, yes? Tomorrow, yes?”
Danny looked up at him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Glaviach had a beard so unruly it looked as if he’d been interrupted swallowing a raccoon. It shook now as he tilted his head back and roared with laughter. He was one of those rare Letts who laughed, as if to make up for the paucity in the rest of the ranks. It wasn’t a laughter Danny particularly trusted, however, since he’d heard that Pyotr Glaviach had been a charter member of the original Letts, men who’d banded together in 1912 to pitch the first guerrilla skirmishes against Nicholas II. These inaugural Letts had waged a campaign of hit-and-hide against czarist soldiers who’d outnumbered them eighty to one. They lived outdoors during the Russian winter on a diet of half-frozen potatoes and massacred whole villages if they suspected a single Romanov sympathizer lived there.
Pyotr Glaviach said, “We go out tomorrow and we hand out pampoolat. For the workers, yes? You see?”
Danny didn’t see. He shook his head. “Pampoo-what?”
Pyotr Glaviach slapped his hands together impatiently. “Pampoolat, you donkey man. Pampoolat.”
“I don’t—”
“Flyers,” a man behind Danny said. “I think he means flyers.”
Danny turned in his booth. Nathan Bishop stood there, one elbow resting on the top of Danny’s seat back.
“Yes, yes,” Pyotr Glaviach said. “We hand out flyers. We spread the news.”
“Tell him ‘okay,’” Nathan Bishop says. “He loves that word.”
“Okay,” Danny said to Glaviach and gave him a thumbs-up.
“Ho-kay! Ho-kay, meester! You meet me here,” Glaviach said. He gave him a big thumbs-up back. “Eight o’clock.”
Danny sighed. “I’ll be here.”
“We have fun,” Glaviach said and slapped Danny on the back. “Maybe meet pretty women.” He roared again and then stumbled away.
Bishop slid into the booth and handed him a mug of beer. “The only way you’ll meet pretty women in this movement is to kidnap the daughters of our enemies.”
Danny said, “What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a Lett?”
“Are you?”
“Hoping to be.”