Red Jacket (40 page)

109

Red Jacket

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1913

They ate a meager breakfast in the hotel dining room before first light. The place was crowded, the other patrons quiet, the town reeling under the tragic events of yesterday's disaster.

Someone at a nearby table said quietly, “I heard seventy, and I heard eighty; I don't think they even know how many yet. The whole thing was chaos.”

Bapcat had given Jordy his gift before they went to breakfast. It was a Krag-Jørgensen.

“It came from Denver. I had to mail-order it.”

“Just like yours?” the boy asked.

“Just like mine.”

“We'll have
our
Christmas later,” Jaquelle whispered to him.

“We have to get back,” he told her.

“I know. We'll be here.”

Vairo and Rousseau were in the tavern. The Barber was with them, and they each had a glass of amber liquid in front of them.

The smell of death hung in the air. “You're here,” Bapcat said.

Labisoniere said, “The world gone mad.”

“How many dead?”

“Seventy-three. There were seventy-four, but a girl in one of the morgues acted as Lazarus and came back to life. She'll live. Or she won't,” he added. “Once again I find myself asking, What are you two doing here?”

“Fate” Zakov said. “We were here when it happened.”

“You heard someone call
Fire?
”

Bapcat said, “We heard stamping feet and a scream that never ended. There was no yell of
Fire
down here, and we didn't hear it mentioned until later, when we were pulling people out, and even that was just panic.”

“Well, witnesses are saying it got yelled upstairs. That's what caused the stampede. There was never any fire.”

“Why would someone do such a thing?” Vairo asked.

The doctor said. “Think of all that has transpired these past five months—the killings, beatings, all of it.”

“Intentional?” Bapcat asked.

The Barber shrugged. “A prank gone wrong, a bored child? Who knows. But we will spend all day today making out death certificates. Paper brings us into the world and paper takes us out. There are bodies spread among several different temporary morgues, but they all have the same look inside: rows of dead innocents struck down without reason.”

“What can we do to help?” Bapcat asked.

“Keep Cruse away from me. He's telling newspapers the union did this to its own people in order to create sympathy.”

An outraged Zakov said, “Slanderous, libelous, scandalous nonsense!”

“Yet that is what our dear sheriff is saying, unchallenged. I asked him if a reward would be offered as it was after Seeberville, and he glared at me like I am a cretin, and he said, ‘It was an accident.' I told him I heard him tell reporters the union had engineered the event, and therefore he had linked cause with effect, which removed it from the realm of accident. He ordered me to mind my own business.”

“Is there a victim list?” Bapcat asked.

“Not yet. We're working diligently on assembling one. Every morgue is in pandemonium as adults search for their children and children search for their parents and relatives search for loved ones, and the nosy come just to satisfy their morbid sense of curiosity. It is sad . . . so damn sad. Eventually we'll get the dead identified and a list made.”

“There's a girl, Draganu Skander,” said Bapcat. “I will help when it is time to bury her.”

The Barber took out a small notebook and pencil and made a note.

“
We
will help,” Zakov said.

“Anything more on the robbery?” Bapcat asked.

“Not one of our regular customers,” Rousseau answered. “We are like a family here. This was an outsider taking advantage. Family does not steal from family.”

“It was beyond chaos—it was pure Dante,” Zakov declared.

“There are opportunists everywhere,” Rousseau said. “You should see
Italia
.”

“Can I use your telephone?” Bapcat asked Vairo.

“Line was cut yesterday. Go next door to A and P Tea and tell Frankie Meyers I sent you. Show him your badge. He was up there last night with you boys, pulling out bodies.”

“No party line?”

“No, we each got our own.”

“And only yours got cut?”

Vairo shrugged.

Photographer Nara went up the stairs with a camera on his shoulder, his brother and another camera behind him.

Next door, Meyers looked exhausted, his back bent. He barely looked at the badge and just pointed at the phone. Bapcat got the number he needed from his own notebook and placed the call to Rollie Echo's home number.

“Echo.”

“Bapcat.”

“Where are you?”

“Red Jacket.”

“You heard the news.”

“Zakov and I were there.”

“You were inside the Italian Hall?”

“Downstairs in the bar. We helped pull out bodies.”

Echo took a long time to respond. “We should talk, soon.”

“Cruse is telling reporters the union did this to its own people as a way to stimulate sympathy.”

“We saw that in today's paper. You got a theory?”

“Not yet. You?”

“Not for phone talk. The Fat Man is acting like chief engineer on the whitewash express.”

“On whose orders?”

“Guess.”

MacNaughton.
“Where's your boss?”

“Somewhere up there with you, wringing his hands. The Fat Man and the Citizens' Alliance want an inquest to empanel jurors, to be impartially selected by the Fat Man himself, not by the medical examiner.”

“Can he do that—legally?”

“Lucas talked to Judge O'Brien, and he acquiesced; he's fed up with everyone and everything.”

“They told Cruse yes?”

“More like they didn't tell him no.”

“And you?”

“Disappointed in my friend. Deeply so.”

“Where exactly
is
your boss?”

“The unanswerable question. Supposedly he is up there with you, taking statements and talking to witnesses. He calls me every hour or so, says there's too many, too much, a biblical flood of information to be sorted through. I want to talk to sane, calm men, like you and Zakov.”

“All right, we'll call back.”

“What're you doing now?”

“Going to find a father to tell him his daughter is dead.”

“Done this sort of thing before?”

“No.”

“Make up words to say and put them in your head and think only about those words, not what they mean, and not what you've seen. Be prepared for any kind of reaction. It's always different.”

“You've done this?”

“Too many times to count.”

They found Jerko Skander in his shack, on his back, blood everywhere, a large knife by his side, his eyes open, same as his daughter. Bapcat said, “We'll tell the Barber, and let him decide what has to be done here. Do you think he is with his daughter now?”

Zakov said, “He made vertical cuts down his arms. He intended to die, not simply to make a plea for help. It would seem we are late with the news of the child. As to your question, Heaven is a pathetic fable, a narcotic for the masses. What great, loving God would randomly extinguish the lives of so fucking many innocents on the eve of his big-shot son's alleged birthday?”

110

Bumbletown Hill

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1913

Capicelli was on time.

“Did you know anyone in the Italian Hall?” Bapcat asked, guessing that from now on, the disaster would serve as some sort of marker in the lives of everyone who lived in the area.

“Everybody knows someone. Word is youse was there, helping rescue people.”

“Not much rescue with so many dead,” Bapcat said. “What do you have for us?”

“Tuesday night this peculiar fella came up to the Rev'rend's house. They talked at the door, and then the fella, he went over to the church and went inside. He not come out till after he was inside almost one hour, so I stand and wait, and suddenly I see my brother Paulie, who's following the captain. We look at each other, like, what is this? And Paulie he tells me, ‘My man inna church too—got there before your man.'

“So then the peculiar fella comes outta the church, starts walking toward the depot, and he's yelling to beat all get-out, only there's a pretty stiff wind, and we ain't quite close enough to make out what it is he's yellin' about. Then my man comes out of the church and goes home, and the captain comes out and Paulie follows him.”

“What was so peculiar about the one fella?”

“I dunno. Maybe how short he was, how funny he looked in an overcoat that almost dragged on the ground, big black hat pulled down over his eyes, big, bushy black mustache, you know—peculiar.”

“What time was this?”

“Around nine. You want us to keep on?”

“Please.”

“You know what's going on?” the man asked.

“Not quite.”

“You want we meet again next week, Friday?”

“Yes,” Bapcat said, guessing it would be sooner.

Trudging up the hill to meet Zakov at the truck, the word innocent continued to roil his mind, but more than that, he wondered if cameras like the one Nara used might someday be smaller and be of some value to police and game wardens. Maybe if there were cameras that also acted like telescopes, they would be good tools for the sort of work Capicelli was doing.

The mental meanderings of an uneducated man,
he chided himself.
Stay here in the now, not in the make-believe world of what might be. Accept the world as it is, not what it might become in some imaginary future.

111

Red Jacket

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1913

The massive St. John the Baptist Croatian Catholic Church on Seventh Street was overrun with mourners and the curious, inside and out. Bapcat and Zakov sat at the ends of two pews, across from each other, a small white coffin bearing the body of Draganu Skander between them in the aisle. The congregants were a single mass of black clothing.

There were four men assigned to each body. Bapcat's partner, a stranger, sat beside him, Zakov's partner beside him. Ten caskets were lined up in the church on unpainted sawhorses. Fresh flowers were on the coffins, and Bapcat wondered where in the world they had gotten them in December, in the Keweenaw. Other churches in town had caskets, as well, no one house of worship carrying all the burden.

The overpowering smell of tallow, incense, human perspiration, and wet leather hung in the air as Father Niklas Polyek droned on in a language Bapcat couldn't understand. Croatian and Latin were both strange in cadence, in tone. The massive priest with his square-cut black beard stood in a pulpit shaped like a ship's bow and cast his thundering voice out over the crowd, echoes ricocheting in the cavernous church like runaway bullets, crossing each other, magnifying each other, canceling each other.

Polyek suddenly switched to English and his big hands were balled into hairy fists as he said without prologue, “I know we got Alliance spies out here in God's house. To you I say, you watch us today. You watch how we bury our dead without tears. This strike our people make is moral and makes God happy. These murders are criminal, mortal sins. You Alliance men must understand Croatians are people of iron will. We will die before we surrender, and these little children's broken bodies are to us the bodies of soldiers fallen in war. You are warned here today by me—and by God Himself. Amen.”

The priest concluded by crossing himself and making his way back to the altar and the bevy of altar boys and priests in colorful garb assisting him.

Bapcat heard music he had never heard before, coming from an organ in the loft above, slow, heavy music filled with inexpressible sadness. Yet people did not sob or let their emotions loose. They brooded in steely silence, their faces dark masks of anger.

When Polyek finished the mass, he signaled the pallbearers to stand by their coffins, and when the music changed they hefted their loads and marched slowly into the street where thousands were gathered, waiting quietly, too many to count. The church's bells began to peal and blend into a chorus of bells across the city. The procession moved north on Seventh toward Pine. There they merged onto the road where horse-drawn hearses waited for them to load the coffins. Out front were automobiles also carrying bodies, and the main sounds were the engines of motorcars, the whinny of horses, and boots sliding through the snowy mush. It had been salting snow all day, but on the way to the staging area on Pine, the snow picked up and the wind gave it some added muscle.

A brass band struck up a heart-rending dirge ahead of them, and Bapcat couldn't tell where in the procession they were. Once they had Draganu Skander safely in her hearse, Bapcat, Zakov, and the other two bearers fell in behind it to walk to Lake View Cemetery, carefully avoiding steaming horse apples as they marched.

Bapcat saw Jaquelle Frei and Jordy walking to his right, their eyes straight ahead.

By the time the front echelons of the long procession reached the graveyard gate, the tail of the procession, two miles back, was just moving out of Red Jacket. Bapcat would later hear that more than five thousand people had marched two miles in the snow and mud, and an estimated forty thousand more had formed a gauntlet through which the dead and marchers passed.

Bapcat and Zakov and their partners removed the casket from the hearse and walked it into the Roman Catholic section of the cemetery, where last night a single large trench had been dug as a mass grave. Boards had been fixed around the trench to allow for foot traffic, to get the bodies into the hole, and Bapcat and Zakov helped to lower Draganu into her final resting place. They stepped back into the crowd to await whatever ceremonies would come next as snow continued to fall and wind gusted from the northwest.

There were twenty-five dead Catholics and twenty-eight dead Protestants, each denomination consigned to their separate part of the cemetery, which struck Bapcat as strange and wrong. They had lived and died together; why could they not pass into eternity together?

A different priest appeared and conducted a ceremony in the same strange language Bapcat had heard in the church. People were packed into the graveyard, including dozens who had climbed trees and hung on branches like fat black birds. With all the thousands in attendance, the fresh snow had been mashed into brown sludge, and it was six o'clock and dark before the final interments were completed. All the mourners left as they had arrived, en masse, as silent as death.

Jaquelle and Jordy walked with the game wardens. “How can this happen?” the Widow Frei asked.

The men had no answers for her, remained silent.

John Hepting materialized from the crowd. “You seen MacNaughton?” the Keweenaw County sheriff asked.

Bapcat shook his head.

“Sonuvabitch isn't here. None of the operators are here, not a goddamn one. Did you hear what happened to Moyer?”

“The union's president?”

“The same. Alliance men grabbed him in his hotel in Hancock, beat the shit out of him, shot him, dragged him across the canal, and put him on a train to Chicago with two of Cruse's men as guards. Some say MacNaughton was there, but I don't know about that. Sonuvabitch has been afraid to show himself much since all this began. He likes to work through other people, not directly.”

“Why Moyer?” Bapcat asked.

“On Friday, Moyer accused the Alliance of creating the Italian Hall panic.”

“After Cruse accused the union on the day it happened.”

“There it is.”

“MacNaughton's idea to give Moyer the heave-ho?”

“What do you think?” the sheriff said noncommittally.

“The governor should have kept all of the soldiers here, John, not just a few men from the local armory. As soon as they withdrew the violence got bad, fast.”

“Our prissy and inept Governor Ferris did not want the State to take sides.”

“When there is an oppressor and the State takes no sides, it is in fact siding with the oppressor,” Zakov declared. “This state has no position on mass murder?”

“Apparently not,” Hepting said. “In Ferris's view, this is a private matter, not a public issue.”

“You could say that about every murder,” Bapcat said.

“Look around,” Jaquelle Frei said. “There are tens of thousands of people here. How private is
that?
”

“You finished with Skander?” Bapcat asked his friend.

“He's already in the ground.”

“What about Cornelio Mangione?”

“The body has been released to his family.”

“And the man with him?”

“Nobody knows who he is. We buried him in a pauper's grave. What the hell went on that night, Lute?”

“We gave our statements,” Bapcat said.

“Between us, off the record.”

“We think Mangione and his friend got set up. They were sent to rattle us so that someone could take them out while their focus was on us.”

“Any notions who?”

Bapcat shook his head.

“Coroner's inquest tomorrow,” Hepting said. “Lucas is overwhelmed, said the people should judge for themselves. At least two-thirds of the jury will be Alliance men. You two were in the hall Christmas Eve. I talked to Dominick.”

“We were there.”

“Any thoughts?”

They stopped walking. “What are you driving at, John?”

“There are multiple reports and descriptions of a man wearing an Alliance button who yelled
Fire
and was seen to run away.”

“I'm sure Cruse will be on it,” Bapcat said sarcastically.

“The Fat Man couldn't care less. Moyer is gone, out of the picture. Now the operators just want all the bodies in the ground and all this shit done and gone. Cruse made his accusation while the dust was still in the air and the bodies still being brought down, and you can bet he didn't take that shot without permission or direction. Good tactics, to attack first.”

Zakov said, “The best strategy for overwhelming your enemy is to follow success with excessive force. You do not defeat an enemy face-to-face; you make him break and run, and destroy him from behind.”

“What if you don't overwhelm him?” Bapcat asked.

“Counterattacks can be overwhelming and reverse the momentum.”

“You think the union will retaliate, John?” Bapcat asked.

Hepting said, “I think this is the end, Lute It may drag on, but it's over. Christmas Eve drove the price too high.”

“Justice thwarted,” Jaquelle Fred said indignantly.

“There's been neither justice nor fair play since day one here,” Hepting said. “Why should that change?”

Bapcat faced his friend. “If you had the guilty man here now, what would you do to him?”

“The one who yelled
Fire,
or the one who put him up to it?”

“Both.”

“I ain't much on theoreticals,” Hepting said.

“You must have some thoughts.”

The sheriff chewed his bottom lip. “Time will tell,” he said, starting to walk away from them, but wheeling back suddenly. “A surface captain from C and H came forward and gave a description entirely different from any others provided. He claimed he was in the street out front, passing by, and he saw a man run out the front door minutes before the disaster.”

“How different?” Bapcat asked.

“Called the man a ginger-head.”

“And?”

“Questionable; an outlier.”

“Maybe he's right and the others wrong.”

“Said captain works for Madog Hedyn.”

“Track-covering?”

“I can't say that; not yet. What I do know is that everyone hooked to the operators is pointing a finger, and all their fingers point at the same place—at the union.”

“Conspiracy,” Zakov said.

Widow Frei asked, “John, do you honestly think the union would kill its own women and children to gain sympathy for the larger cause?”

Hepting looked at Bapcat. “The sheriff in me would arrest the two and seek justice within the system. The other part of me—the part I think of as a man—well, he wouldn't bother troubling the system. And hell no, Jaquelle, I don't.”

“The blackest of talk from a peace officer,” Zakov said.

“There can come a time when you have to lay aside your badge and oath and pay homage to a higher authority.”

As Hepting walked away Bapcat leaned over to Zakov. “He knows who did this.”

“Which part?”

“Both . . . all.”

“Why doesn't he tell us?”

“He thinks we know, too, and he wants space for himself.”

“
Do
we know?”

Bapcat nodded solemnly. “Probably.”

“When will you share with your partner?”