Lawless (39 page)

“If you wish to have a conversation with me, at least do me the courtesy of retiring to my study so my guests needn’t be offended by your boorishness.”

“Oh, no.” Gideon shook his head. “I want your guests to hear all I have to say.”

Courtleigh’s restraint broke. He took another step up, and Gideon had seldom heard such venom in a voice.

“Very well, Mr. Kent. If it’s a public scene you want, it’s a public scene you shall have! We’ll begin by discussing the disappearance of my assistant general manager, Sidney Florian, in the fire which swept the West Side last Sunday evening. His body has been lost, but I have witnesses who know how he met his death.” Courtleigh shook a finger in Gideon’s face. “Witnesses who will testify that he was murdered!”

A kind of surflike murmur spread around the ballroom.

“Murder?”

“Who was murdered?”

“What’s Tom talking about? Is that fellow a murderer?”

Gideon said, “I’d be happy to discuss it—”

Thunderstruck, Courtleigh retreated to the lowest step. His smug expression was gone. The Strother girl was pathetically distraught. She looked as if she might faint.

“So long as you first explain how Mr. Florian got to the West Side. How and why.” Gideon raised his voice. “The man your host is talking about was one of his employees, and the leader of a gang of thugs who invaded a private home last Sunday night. Their purpose—”

“Shut up, Kent,” Courtleigh whispered. Perspiration beaded his forehead suddenly. “Shut your mouth.”

Gideon didn’t even glance at him. He spoke to the silent throng. “Their purpose was to break up a peaceful meeting held by a few men who thought Mr. Courtleigh’s rail line was unfair in the matter of wages and benefits. The men gathered to discuss organizing a protest. To
discuss
it! That’s all! Apparently the Constitutional guarantee of the right to peaceful assembly is voided when you go to work for the Wisconsin and Prairie.”

The white-haired woman began screaming, “Thomas, silence him.
Silence him!”

Then there were hisses. Men stepping forward—though not far—to exclaim.

“Socialist!”

“Communard!”

“Throw him out of here!”

“Break his head open!”

The railroad president looked stunned and confused. He seemed on the point of rushing up to throttle Gideon. Yet something—his mother’s hectoring, his fiancée’s distraught behavior, the shock of what was happening in his own home—kept him rooted while Gideon roared over the crescendo of sound.

“Mr. Courtleigh’s thugs came calling with guns and knives. One of them—Florian—shot at me and I fired back. I wounded Florian and I’ll admit that in any court in the land—except the ones Mr. Courtleigh can buy here in Chicago. I too have witnesses, and they’ll swear I acted in self-defense.”

“What witnesses?” Courtleigh snarled. “That slut of a Lucy Stoner?” He was purple from the humiliation of having Gideon ignore him. But Gideon knew where his audience lay.

“They’ll also swear to what Mr. Courtleigh’s brave lads did to the son of the man at whose house the meeting took place. A boy named Torvald Ericsson. He was no more than ten years old. This belonged to him.”

From where he’d tucked it in his waistband, Gideon drew out the shirt. The garment was stiff with dried blood. The moment he held it up, there was absolute silence again.

Behind him he heard heavy boots hammer, then stop. The stable hands? Evidently so. Courtleigh saw them, hesitated, finally gestured them back.

Gideon held the shirt at arm’s length, down where Courtleigh could see it clearly. “One of your thugs put a knife in Torvald Ericsson. He died the same night.”

White, Courtleigh could barely croak, “That—that is a foul piece of—character assassination, an—utter lie.”

“Now we know how you protect your profits, Courtleigh. By killing children!”

Courtleigh lost control and fairly screamed at Gideon, “You’re lying. You’re a filthy liar!”

“Of course he’s lying,” a woman cried. “Tom would never do anything so despicable. The man’s mad.”

“Mad or a Communard, it’s the same thing,” someone else yelled. There was more hissing and even some oaths quite out of place in the mixed company.

Courtleigh heard his friends coming to his defense and skillfully took advantage of it. “I don’t deny I sent observers to that gathering of anarchists—”

“Observers!” Gideon exclaimed, but now Courtleigh had regained some confidence, and outshouted him.

“They had no orders to hurt anyone, and certainly no orders to hurt children. The very idea is ludicrous!”

“That’s right,” a male guest bellowed. “Tom’s a law-abiding, God-fearing man. Throw that lying Communard out of here!”

Other guests echoed it, surging to the foot of the stairs, their mood ugly. A feeling of defeat began to fill Gideon as he spread the shirt by the shoulders.

Women turned away, covering their mouths with their fans or their gloves. Men cursed him even as their eyes were drawn to the knife slashes in the bloodied fabric.

“I hear what you say, Courtleigh.” Gideon pitched his voice low on purpose. It stilled the angry outbursts and brought the crowd forward in macabre fascination. “I’m afraid this piece of evidence speaks louder. You note the size? Clearly a boy’s shirt, not a man’s. I took this from the body of Nils Ericsson’s son. Ericsson himself died in the fire, so you don’t have to worry about him. But you do have to worry about me. You can burn this. Bribe all your hired thugs to keep silent. Persuade a few of your fine friends to perjure themselves and testify to your impeccable character—”

Growls from the crowd at that—an ugly, animal sound. Gideon was badly shaken. He hadn’t expected all of them to be on Courtleigh’s side, but they were.

“Perhaps you can even convince yourself none of it happened. But I know it did. I saw it. And I can’t be bought or silenced.
You’re a murderer, Courtleigh!”

Gideon flung the shirt.

Courtleigh leaped back, his eyes fixed on the garment as if it were poisonous. The shirt fluttered down next to the hem of Miss Strother’s ball gown. The sight of the ripped and bloodstained fabric was all it took to shatter her. She started moaning, softly at first, then louder. She stabbed her hands into her carefully arranged, hairdo, tearing it apart.

Courtleigh shouted, “Get him out of here. Get him out of this house!”

The crowd roared agreement. The stable hands, both burly young men, rushed Gideon from behind.

He turned in time to gut punch one of them. The other slashed the edge of his hand across Gideon’s neck, making him stumble and bend forward from the waist with an exclamation of pain. A second chopping blow drove him to his knees.

The two seized Gideon under the arms of his plum-colored coat and hauled him into the foyer. In the ballroom, a roar of shocked exclamations erupted. But loudest of all were two voices.

Courtleigh’s fiancée, shrieking as she tore her hair.

And Courtleigh yelling at her, nearly as hysterical.

“Be quiet. What’s the matter with you? He’s a lunatic. Every word was false! Can’t you control yourself? Damn you, be quiet!
BE QUIET!”

The stable hands dragged Gideon to the front door and booted him down the steps. He landed hard. Coachmen formed into small groups. They stood by the pillars at the driveway entrance as he picked himself up and moved unsteadily toward the street.

One of the stable hands took a threatening step just before Gideon passed. Gideon tensed, ready to defend himself even though he was groggy. The two took note of the glint in his blue eye and decided they’d fulfilled their employer’s orders. After a couple of obscene taunts they turned and strolled back to the mansion.

Gideon dusted himself off as he reached the street. While he was crossing Twentieth, the orchestra resumed. Mingled with the melody he thought he detected a woman’s screams. But that quickly faded and only the lilting music remained. Hearing it played as if nothing had happened, he felt a stinging sense of failure.

In the ballroom he’d gotten exactly what he wanted—for a little while. He’d gotten an acknowledgment of Courtleigh’s guilt through his violent behavior. Gideon supposed no one had ever dared to confront the railroad president that way before—in his own home and in front of friends of his own class.

So perhaps a debt had been discharged in Torvald Ericsson’s name. But only a very small one.

The music from the mansion swelled, and he asked himself whom he had persuaded. Courtleigh’s friends and cronies would remain that. They would remain the enemies of workingmen.

What had he changed, then? Nothing. His accusation would have no effect on Courtleigh’s power, Courtleigh’s style of operation, Courtleigh’s determination to resist unions. He had seen Courtleigh squirm, but at best the whole thing was—in Julia’s phrase—a theatrical gesture.

And instead of feeling good about it, he remembered the rage and loathing in the eyes of Courtleigh’s friends and felt terrible.

He wiped his perspiring cheek. Time to think about the future—and to do it a little more realistically for a change. What if he kept right on just as he’d planned? What if he wrote about Courtleigh’s crime in the
Beacon?
Who would believe the charges, or act upon them?

Again the inevitable answer—no one. Courtleigh would find and pay a score of witnesses to prove he’d never ordered the missing Florian to commit murder.

The last of the stormy satisfaction vanished. He felt that he, not Thomas Courtleigh, was the loser this evening. He kept thinking of the hostility of the guests. The words with which they’d taunted him.

Socialist.

Communard.

It was almost inevitable that people in Courtleigh’s crowd would believe that of trade unionists. No amount of editorializing would change their minds. But as he trudged up the front steps of Julia’s house, he sadly realized the great majority of Americans also held the same opinion. And he’d never change
their
minds or break down
their
prejudices by writing little articles in a paper no one bought.

He lingered on the stoop, thinking about Julia’s remarks earlier in the evening. The ends for which he was working might be worthy, but the means were laughable. To change even a few minds about the movement was an immense job. The kind of job which required an instrument of great authority and influence, not a little penny sheet, as Julia so aptly called it.

The answer seemed obvious. The immense task required an instrument like the New York
Union.

Quite without warning, he felt an eerie sense of his father’s presence, a sense of Jephtha being close by and struggling to communicate with him. The Bible verse suddenly came to mind.

And the Lord said unto him, Surely I will be with thee, and thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man.

Insights flooded into his mind with incredible speed. Perhaps Jephtha had marked that verse because he believed Gideon
could
bring about some meaningful changes in society. Perhaps his father had wanted to tell him that.

Speak to G.

And was that the end of it? Somehow, Gideon didn’t think so. He had a conviction that his father had believed he must go about his work differently. Julia had been the one to suggest that, just as she’d been the one to suggest the new approach—one which had been in front of him all the time, yet hidden from him by his own narrow frame of reference. It had taken the scene in the ballroom to show him the need for a new means of attacking and overcoming the Courtleighs of America.

He drew a deep, exhilarated breath. The evening might not be a debacle after all. Just the opposite. He rushed inside to find Julia and discuss the idea that was becoming more appealing to him every moment.

As it turned out, Gideon was completely wrong in one judgment which he’d made. The effect of his visit to Mr. Thomas Courtleigh’s was not nearly so insignificant as he imagined, though just then he had no way of foreseeing the extent of its profound, even tragic consequences in Courtleigh’s life.

And his.

L
ATE THE NEXT
afternoon, Julia and Gideon were taking tea in the second-floor solarium on the south side of the house. Gideon was depressed by the thought of his departure the next day. She felt the same way. Both made a conscious effort to hide their feelings and keep their conversation animated as they discussed his conclusions about his future, and how he meant to implement them.

“I realize you were right last night, Julia. It’s better to reach ten thousand people than ten. It’s the only way to get public opinion squarely against Courtleigh and his kind.”

“Don’t be too sure it’ll be possible. At least not immediately.” He remembered Strelnik’s prediction that he would ultimately experience frustration which would vent itself in rage. “I’m not saying the effort shouldn’t be made, Gideon. It should.”

“Yes, long as I remember one thing.” For a moment he saw a lifeless face in a railroad yard besieged by a winter storm. “The man I’m working for.”

“The chap you first met on the southbound train after the war?”

He nodded. “Miller.”

“I’m sure you won’t forget him,
or
what he stands for. You’re not the kind to let yourself forget.” A moment’s silence. “Will you speak to Molly soon?”

“As soon as I put a few things in order. It’ll take a couple of months to tie up the affairs of my penny sheet, as you called it.” He chuckled. “Did you realize that’s what I charge for
Labor’s Beacon?”

“Truly? I confess I’ve never paid much attention to the price.”

“A cent a copy. I guess I’m living in the past. Inflation killed the penny press years ago.”

She thought for a moment. “I suppose you realize carrying out your plan won’t be easy.”

“I’ve found that very few worthwhile accomplishments are easy, Julia. In fact I can only think of one.” A grin. “Inheriting several million dollars.”

She laughed. “But you’ve really marked out a huge piece of work for yourself. Changing careers—”