Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (25 page)

Ella said, “Everyone’s lost somebody, I think.”

“It’s not
easy to survive these days, is it, between the war and the flu,” he said. “And a
hard time after, if you do.”

Why didn’t this marshal pounce: search her,
interrogate her, take her away? Why did he stalk her with conversation?

To
change the subject to something else, anything else, she said, “Why did your friend
turn down being Secretary of War?”

“Well, he’s a Quaker. Not fully a
pacifist—they call him the Fighting Quaker. He’s in favor of
this
war
because it was thrust upon us. But he feared his faith could complicate initiating
another. And the day may come when we have to strike first. So he took a different
post.”

She nodded, unsure what to reply.

“I’m a Quaker as well,” he
said. “We’re supposed to be Catholics, we Irish. But my mother was a Friend, and she
took pity on the besotted fellow who became my dad.”

“Did the draft board
assign you to a farm camp? That’s where they send Quakers, isn’t it?”

“On the
contrary, most Friends who object are shipped straight to the battlefield. Ordered
to carry stretchers if we won’t carry guns. But not all of us object. I didn’t get
called, but I’d have gone. I don’t believe in shirking. It only leaves the dirty
work to others.”

She thought of Nicky in a hovel in Mexico because he refused
to kill poor men like himself to settle rich men’s quarrels.

The marshal
watched her carefully. “I believe in this war—the Germans saw to that.”

“What
about your Quaker beliefs?”

“Our convictions are individual, not
institutional—there’s no high church to tell us what to do. We find our own ways to
stay firm in our four tenets, and we leave it at that.” He flushed a
little.

“I see.” She made herself smile. While he was talking, she was spared
the effort. “What are the tenets?”

He looked surprised by her interest.
“Simplicity, equality, tolerance, peace. But again, it’s different when war’s forced
on you. When there’s no peace without a fight.”

Nicky had said to her, before
he left for Mexico, “It’s not just me who doesn’t understand this war, Ella. There’s
no one on earth who can find the bone under the skin. It’s senseless grudges by men
who’ll never win treasure enough to satisfy them. They send their countrymen to
spill innocent blood, including their own, and get nothing in return.” He’d been
gone almost two years and still the carnage continued, and still no one understood
why.

“And any day,” the marshal said, “we’ll learn we’ve done it. Won the war
and brought the peace. Armistice any day now, they say. There’s a rumor it might be
tonight. But lately, there’s always a rumor.”

“No peace without a fight,” Ella
repeated. “Do you Quakers introduce paradox into all four tenets? Your friend is the
Fighting Quaker? Do you also have Klansman Quakers?”

“Never that.” He flashed
a smile that seemed different from those previous. Because he’d shaken her close to
showing her true feelings? “And Mitchell Palmer, well, however a person may judge
his views on war, he’s kept to the tenets. Served three terms in Congress, working
for an end to child labor, a tariff system to protect the poorest workers. That’s
why I helped put him in office. I worked on his first campaign and ran the next
two.”

Ella squirmed in her seat. She had the sense this was, for him, turning
into a real conversation. Was that to her benefit, or did it merely protract this
ordeal?

“I first heard Palmer speak when I was at Penn. Years ago, studying
history, like yourself.” His tone softened and so did his smile. If she didn’t know
he was a marshal, she’d think he was flirting. “He was a determined young
progressive. And I found we spoke the same language. Right down to the rare
‘thee’ and ‘thou’ if we aren’t careful.”

Could it be he really knew Palmer?
Was it possible he
had
seen her walking past? It wouldn’t change the fact
that he’d removed his nickel star. Or that he seemed intent on coaxing her to offer
. . . what? An admission she’d lived on R Street? Why not confront her with it, pat
her down if he was after Mrs. Kingston’s jewels?

She heard the door at the
other end of the car slide open. The marshal twisted toward the aisle to glance over
his shoulder.

While his attention was elsewhere, she looked him over. He was
an attractive man, square-shouldered and lean at the waist. His profile under the
thick ginger hair, clipped short along the sides and combed straight on top, showed
a strong brow and firm jaw. She noticed too, though it was silly to do so, that he
smelled of bay rum aftershave. When he turned back, his eyes widened from a squint.
She looked away, but not before she caught his pleasure at having found himself
examined.

“It wasn’t the porter,” he said. “If you’re waiting for
one.”

She shook her head to show she wasn’t.

“If you’re thinking of
whiling away some time inside the terminal, you ought to walk through the train.
Leave it where the platform’s enclosed. Even a mild November night in Chicago is
enough to make someone from Washington weep. But perhaps you grew up in a raw
climate? Where is it you go home to now?”

Had he searched her coat pockets and
seen her tickets?

“Oh, I don’t mind the cold,” she said. Mrs. Kingston would
have raised her brows and pinched her lips to show she found the question
impertinent. But Ella’s features weren’t trained to it.

“And so Georgetown’s
on break already, then? Earlier than usual, isn’t it?”

“The flu.” She was on
comfortable footing here, at least. “The mayor outlawed public meetings, and so the
schools have closed.”

“Ah yes, of course,” he said. “But if they keep you
longer into the summer to compensate, you may dislike the heat and mosquitoes. Or do
you go home to worse?”

“It was wise of them to do it, I think.”

If he
was here to find her, he’d know her destination from her ticket. So why did he keep
asking where she lived? In case someone came to meet her train and take her on by
car?

Beyond the marshal and across the aisle, windows framed a sky shingled
with wet clouds. The last traces of daylight were fading over acres of ground
covered in curved and crossing tracks. In the distance, a canal was overspread with
a rust-streaked railroad bridge. She watched a train flash across it while others
moved slowly alongside the narrow waterway. She struggled to say something about it,
or to find another innocuous topic, but the words wouldn’t come.

“Your history
classes?” The marshal shifted so his knees touched her coat on the seat between
them. She saw that his pale blue eyes were made intense by dark rings around the
iris. “Have they influenced your view of this war?” His brows were raised
attentively, as if he were sincerely interested in her answer.

Ella felt
herself go cold. The Sedition Act made criticizing the war a crime punishable by
$10,000 and twenty years in prison. Enforcement was literal and Draconian. She’d
read about a filmmaker sentenced to ten years at hard labor for a harsh portrayal of
the British in his movie about the Revolutionary War. They were our allies now, and
it was sedition to defame them (or the President) in any context. It wasn’t
possible, these days, to be careful enough.

“I agree with you,” she said.
“Sometimes peace has to be won.”

“And your professors concur?”

“Of
course. Why wouldn’t they?”

“I understand that some at Georgetown, Harvard and
Yale too, draw supposed contrasts between our laws and our
Constitution.”

“Really?” This turn of conversation seemed very bad to her.
Sounding her out about the war and now the Sedition Act?

“They talk of
starting a civil liberties league. To challenge the Alien and Sedition Acts, the
Anarchist Exclusion Act.” He watched her unblinkingly. “Deportations under the
Immigration Act.”

“I didn’t know that.”

She couldn’t make sense of this.
She felt sure he was looking for her in particular—why else would he keep bringing
up R Street? She’d supposed it had to do with the stolen jewels. But he’d have no
reason to care about the politics of a thief, would he?

She heard the blood
roar in her ears. Had she done something to make a marshal suspect her of sedition?
Every alien knew someone who’d been dragged onto a boat. If the government bothered
with hearings at all, they were closed-door, one immigration officer and no
translator.

She was glad the marshal was speaking again. She couldn’t have
constructed a coherent sentence.

“Civil liberties,” he said. “I don’t begrudge
lawyers and courts their roles. But except in extreme cases, I say leave the law to
those who write it.” He paused for her reply. When none came, he added, “And if they
overstep, then vote for different men. Better that than putting it in the pockets of
appointees with grudges and personal stakes. Or do you take the opposite
view?”

She managed a “No.”

“Having run Palmer’s political campaigns,
that’s my orientation. But your professors, they influence the next generation of
voters. We Democrats need them on our side. That’s why I asked.”

She smiled as
if flattered he’d posed the question.

“And forming a civil liberties league .
. .” He leaned closer. “It implies people get dragged away just for thinking the
wrong thoughts. But you’ve never been made to feel shy, have you, about expressing a
view in the classroom?”

“No.”

If she didn’t know he was a marshal, if
she hadn’t seen him still wearing his star, would she be goaded into arguing? Would
she be fool enough to let her true opinions slip?

“You have to weigh the
extent to which a tool serves the common good,” he went on. Determined to draw Ella
out? “The Sedition Act may pull in a few it shouldn’t. But the courts can sort that
out. And in times of war, you have to judge value by percentages, don’t you think?
Weigh the inconvenience to a few against the harm to innocents? Like the servant who
lost her hands opening a package bomb meant for a senator. They say it was built
from a manual, bought for twenty-five cents mail order.”

Ella felt a cold
sweat glue stray curls to her hairline. Luigi Galleani’s newspaper sold tracts full
of threats and bluster. It was his style of rhetoric, but no one at the Hall took it
seriously. When Galleani lectured, he was fiery but he stayed inside the law. Mr.
Shelstein, who booked their speakers, insisted on it. Then the laws changed.
Galleani’s paper was shut down along with a hundred others. Like Emma Goldman and
Eugene Debs, Galleani was in prison now.

Was the marshal looking for an
admission that Ella knew him? Did he mean to learn where she was going in case she
was joining a conspiracy there?

But no one in Washington knew Ella once called
herself an Anarchist. She’d never even mentioned Nicky.

Nicky.
Had he
come back now that the war was ending? Had the marshals been following him? Maybe
he’d gone looking for Ella at the Kingstons’?

She barely mastered the impulse
to grab her coat and lurch over the marshal’s knees into the aisle. She could bear
anything but that. Anything but Nicky arrested, lost to her.

A tiger
has
to chase you if you try to get away from it, Ella.
Nicky had been
breathless, his eyes bright.
It will stalk you patiently for hours and hours if
you don’t run. But the second you do, it has to come after you. It’s like a
machine, and you’ve pulled a lever. It has to chase you because that’s how a
tiger is.
He’d been poring over newspaper accounts of the Champawat tiger.
It had eaten 430 humans by then, and hunters were willing to try anything.
They
heard about this village where people wear masks on the backs of their heads.
Because if a tiger sees your face, it doesn’t understand you’re running away. It
knows humans don’t run backwards. And if it doesn’t know you’re running, maybe
you can get someplace safe.
He’d said it solemnly, and she could see him
imagining it all. She remembered the cut on his chin—he hadn’t been shaving long,
hadn’t been good at it yet. Even at that age, she’d wanted to kiss it. Even then,
she’d been in love with him.
That’s how you get away from a tiger, Ella.
And she’d nodded as if there were tigers all over Seattle.

She forced herself
to rest her head against the seat back, to try to overcome her panic. As long as
this marshal was still stalking her, not yet detaining her, she had a chance. She
turned toward him and mustered a smile. She didn’t know yet how to get away, but she
could show a false face in the meantime. Fool him into thinking she wouldn’t
run.

“I’m told there’s a luncheonette inside the terminal. Do you know it?”
She managed a slight laugh. “I don’t believe I can face the dining car again. Every
meal is smothered in gravy and stinks of canned peas.”

“Why yes, I know the
luncheonette.” She could see his puzzlement. See him making new
calculations.

“I don’t want you to feel obliged,” she said. “But . . . if you
mean to take your supper too? I’d enjoy . . .” She couldn’t quite make herself say
she’d enjoy his company.

“Certainly.” His face relaxed. “Yes, I’d be glad to
join you.”

He stood and extended a hand to help her up. He looked smug,
flattered. The mask on the back of her head seemed to be fooling him.

Putting
herself on the arm of a marshal was one of the hardest things Ella had ever done. As
he walked her through the train’s mustard and burgundy cars, she saw two men outside
following along. She recognized them as the other marshals. They were looking
through the windows to see where their boss led.

How could she have thought
this was about Mrs. Kingston’s jewelry? She was barely five feet tall—it wouldn’t
take three armed men to arrest a small and ailing thief. But a “radical”? Someone
who’d seen Galleani speak, who knew a draft dodger in Mexico? These days, a
connection to any Anarchist was seen as “intended to provoke, incite, or encourage
resistance to the United States.” Did they think Ella was traveling with dynamite?
(Hadn’t the marshal asked if she had baggage? Hadn’t he sent someone to the luggage
car?) Conversation with a thief would yield less than a search would. But an
“innocent” chat with an Anarchist could lead to information about
accomplices.