Jack of Spies (27 page)

“Not yet,” Kensley admitted, “and it is possible that de Lacey was imagining things. But I still don’t think so.” He paused as they crossed a road. “Seán Tiernan is a new name to me,” he said when they reached the other side. “I’ll ask Cumming to check him out with Kell—that’s his opposite number in the Security Service. If Kell’s people don’t know the man, then they’ll go looking. Ireland’s their responsibility.”

“He normally lives in Dublin, on Cork Street,” McColl offered.

“Good. Do you know when he’s going back?”

“He said a few weeks when I asked him, but I wouldn’t
count on it. He’ll be in Paterson this weekend, him and Colm Hanley. There’s an IWW rally, something to do with last year’s strike. Caitlin will be there, too, interviewing wives.”

“And you?”

“Yes, I’m going. What can you tell me about the IWW? It’s just another union, isn’t it?”

Kensley shook his head. “It’s more than that. Their idea is a giant union that includes all the workers and is powerful enough to see off any employer. With no one allowed to make profits, we’ll all live happily ever after.”

“You’re not a believer, then.” They were walking past the entrance to a luxury apartment building, where a black man in a brass-buttoned suit was helping a resident with her latest shopping.

“They have some decent people—Eugene Debs is a man who’s hard to dislike—and they’ve won a few battles, but there’s no way they’re going to overthrow the whole goddamn system, and I think they’re beginning to realize it. So these days they seem to spend most of their time arguing among themselves about what to do next. Debs and his friends think politics is part of the answer, but men like ‘Big Bill’ Haywood are still clinging to the original big-union idea. And as in any losing game, you’ll always find a few bright sparks who are willing to up the stakes, especially when it’s other people’s lives they’re gambling with.”

“Tiernan strikes me as that kind of man.”

“Handle him with care, then. And watch out for yourself in Paterson—trouble’s more likely than not, and they don’t mess about in this country. Neither the owners nor the unions. They’ll both be out for blood.”

“An area like this,” McColl said, casting his eyes over one colonnaded, graystone mansion, “and you can see why. If you have a house like that, you’re not going to give it up. And if you don’t have one, you hate the man who does.”

On Tuesday afternoon McColl accompanied Jed and Mac to Pier 59, where the White Star Line’s
Olympic
was loading for departure. The ship looked much like her sister
Titanic
, but none of the boarding passengers seemed overly concerned that history might repeat itself. As Mac wryly noted, icebergs never struck twice in the same place.

Earlier that day they had all said good-bye to the bottle green Maia, which a Yale professor had driven away after drawing the lucky short straw. The other New York buyers would have a few months’ wait while theirs were built and shipped.

“So what shall I tell Ma?” Jed asked his brother once Mac had ascended the gangplank. “About when you’re coming home.”

“Nothing,” McColl told him. “I’ll write to her tonight and tell her you’re on your way. And that I’ll be home soon.”

“You will?”

“I will. I can’t stay here forever, can I?”

“I suppose not. But for God’s sake be careful while you are. After everything that’s happened, it isn’t that easy just leaving you here on your own.”

“What, alone in the big city?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Of course I do. But I’m pretty sure that danger’s passed.” And he was. Keeping an eye out for trouble had become almost second nature, but since their arrival in New York he’d noticed nothing untoward and had never had the feeling of being watched or followed.

“I hope you’re right,” Jed was saying.

“So do I, but let’s talk about something else. Are you heading straight back to Glasgow?”

“I have to. They’re expecting me at the Prudential a week tomorrow. April Fools’ Day,” he added bitterly. “It’s going to be so
boring
after all of this. I’m almost hoping for a war to liven things up.”

“Don’t say that,” McColl said. “Not even in jest.”

“Who was joking?”

McColl couldn’t help laughing. A few minutes later, he watched his brother board, exchanged final waves, and walked off down the quay toward the city. The ship wouldn’t leave for an hour or so, but it felt like they were already gone, and despite his earlier teasing of Jed he did feel alone without them. They had spent the best part of six months together, and he had grown accustomed to their silly jokes and ridiculous bravado.

Jed’s comment that a war might save him from boredom came back to McColl. His younger brother was a fool in so many ways, but he loved him dearly. Caitlin’s Colm was also a fool, and in ways that might prove much more damaging, but she would love her brother every bit as much.

Mill-Town Alley

He had some business loose ends to tie up, but by Wednesday evening McColl was wholly a man of leisure, with no one else for company. Over the next couple of days, he did a lot of walking and made the most of the city’s attractions, gazing out from skyscraper observation platforms, sitting in smoke-filled moving-picture houses, puzzling over the latest European paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He was still staying at the expensive Aberdeen, having convinced Kensley that leaving his luxury hotel for a fleabag would dent his credentials as a successful businessman and thereby cast doubt on the story he had told the Hanleys, that business was the reason for prolonging his stay. According to Kensley’s probably fanciful account, Cumming had huffed and puffed at first but then agreed to transfer the funds McColl needed to support this Reillyesque life.

Paterson, he knew, would be another world. On Saturday morning he took the Christopher Street Ferry across the Hudson and met Caitlin, Colm, and Seán Tiernan at the Hoboken terminal of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. She had already bought his ticket, and he was pleasantly surprised by the
lack of overt hostility from her two young companions. Tiernan in particular seemed in a jovial mood, as if they were heading out on a picnic rather than visiting an industrial battlefield. Neither he nor Colm questioned McColl’s presence on the jaunt, and Colm actually asked him about his time in South Africa. Caitlin had obviously begged him to be civil.

“So pretend I’m one of your less knowledgeable readers,” McColl told her as the first factories and chimneys of the New Jersey shore flitted past their carriage window, “and explain what’s been happening since last year’s strike.”

She did her best, but it was a complicated story. The 1913 strike had been defeated, but not as comprehensively as some had claimed. In the immediate aftermath, some owners had conceded a nine-hour day while others had increased the wages they paid. Some were now using the economic downturn to renege on these deals, and Sunday’s rally was intended, among other things, to demonstrate the widespread opposition to such backsliding. But as always seemed to be the case, defeat had sown divisions among the various groups of workers and their political champions. The ribbon weavers had different priorities from the broad silk weavers, and the latter saw things differently from the dyers’ helpers. The socialists and the IWW had blamed each other for the strike’s failure, and now the former were concentrating on securing deals on a plant-by-plant basis, while the IWW remained committed to an all-or-nothing approach.

“Which is why this rally’s important,” Caitlin concluded. “All the silk workers have to agree on a few basic demands—like the nine-hour day—and then hold together until they’re met.”

“How many hours are they working now?” McColl asked.

“Ten hours five days a week and four on Saturday morning.”

“For the princely sum of six dollars,” Colm added. “But you’re still fighting last year’s strike, sis. A few basic demands, holding together—they did all that for six months, and they lost. Something has to change. We have to scare the bastards.”

“How?” Caitlin asked. “The last time I heard, the IWW was still opposed to violence.”

“It still is,” Tiernan agreed, without turning his face from the window. “But the owners aren’t, and when their tame sheriffs and hired hands use violence against us, then we have the right to defend ourselves in any way we can.”

“With guns?” Caitlin asked.

“We must fight like with like,” Tiernan said, finally turning to face her. “If they use sticks, then so do we. And if they use guns …” He shrugged.

“And this is IWW policy?”

“Not so you’d notice, not yet. But it will be.”

“God, I hope not.”

“There are a lot of us feel this way, sis,” Colm said.

She shook her head. “You won’t beat them that way. They have all the weapons, for God’s sake.”

“We don’t need to beat them,” Tiernan said calmly. “Every time they bring out the militia, your average American has to reach in his pocket. He won’t stand for that, or not for long anyway—eventually he’ll turn against the bosses. We don’t have to win a war, just keep fighting battles.”

“I think you’re overestimating the influence of the average American.”

“I’m a stranger here, so that’s possible. But what I know from Dublin, and what surely to God you must know from all the doings in Paterson, is that the old ways don’t work anymore. If there was a God looking down who was ready and willing to intervene, then maybe a worker could shame his boss into paying a decent wage by striking and starving his family. But there isn’t, and the boss has no reason to care. And until we give him one that he can’t ignore, nothing will change.”

On reaching Paterson, Colm and Tiernan headed off to the IWW local, where lodging had been organized for visiting
activists. Caitlin, to McColl’s delight, had decided to share his hotel room rather than stay with the family she’d gotten to know during the previous year. “They hardly have room for one another,” she said, “and I have to sleep with the children. If someone’s going to keep me awake for half of the night, I’d rather it were you.”

They found a middling hotel on Main Street and registered as Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. She asked the clerk to have their bags taken up and told a disappointed McColl that she was going straight out. “I won’t drag you around with me,” she said as they reached the street, “but at least come and meet Ruthie. It’s not far, and after that you can do what you want.”

As they walked toward the river, downtown’s seeming prosperity gave way to wretched tenements and the mills where their residents toiled. “I’ll be spending the next few hours with wonderful people,” Caitlin said, “and they’re all going to be at the end of their tethers. I’ll swan in and I’ll swan out again, and their terrible lives will just go on. And I’ll go back to New York and earn money from telling their story. Sometimes I hate what I’m doing.”

“Journalists have to be paid,” McColl said. “And if you tell their stories well enough, their lives might get a little less terrible.”

“I know. But …”

Ruthie lived on the top floor of a three-story tenement building. There were two small rooms and an even smaller kitchen—the toilet was three flights down in the yard. Her three children shared the double bed that filled one room, she and her husband a pull-down bed in the room where everyone lived. This was uncluttered by possessions and very clean. As Ruthie poured coffee from that day’s jug, her two girls and one boy sat watching their visitors in respectful silence.

McColl looked for a sense of relief when Caitlin announced that she wouldn’t be staying, but Ruthie and the children seemed genuinely disappointed, and the latter were mollified only by the
promise of another visit in the summer. When Caitlin got down to business, Ruthie told her that times were hard and that most people were still trying to pay off the debts they’d incurred during the previous year’s strike. “And the feeling’s still bad,” she said. “People won’t work with them who crossed picket lines. The bosses have had to fire a few of them—some reward for loyalty, eh? Well, they should have been loyal to their own people.”