Sweet Thunder Read online

  My disguise, sudden as it was, couldn’t be much; Armbrister’s derby instead of my fedora, a casual jacket borrowed from a mystified Cavaretta instead of my customary suit coat, several pats of Mary Margaret Houlihan’s face powder to gray my beard. My hope was that from a distance I would blend into the downtown shopping crowd, should Famine catch a glimpse of me. That and ducking and dodging from store window to store window like a crazyhouse of mirrors.

  From the Thunder building Famine dug hard to propel his load, the delivery route stretching literally up the Hill, the tilted streets that were the apron of the higher elevation where the black steel headframes stood silent above the shut mines. The course was also a rise through society, from the newspaper’s disreputable neighborhood to that pinnacle of Butte majesty, the Hennessy Building, block by block. It kept me busy adjusting, bearing out all too well Grace’s chameleon-on-a-barber-pole accusation. In Venus Alley, where Famine deposited Thunders on the stoop of each brothel—interesting that reading material was in such demand—I had to meld with some other lingerers, my hat on the back of my head as if out for a good time, giving the appearance of shopping the painted-up women smiling and whistling down from the windows. Next a slight step up in respectability, or not, the cigar stores—so called—that essentially were speakeasies with a tobacco aroma. As Famine made his deliveries, setting the brake on the carriage and darting into each drinking establishment with papers under his arm, I followed him from across the street, keeping a careful distance and successfully loitering unseen until he reached the most notorious of the lot, the M&M. Just as the boy sped to the doorway, he ran smack into Smitty, exiting. I felt the shock of their collision in my every bone.

  “Hey, kiddo, what’s the rush?” I heard the burly bootlegger ask genially as I spun to feign interest in the nearest shop window, which, to my horror, held the casket display of the C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home. And in there, scant feet away, long face pursed as he shined up the coffins with a rag and linseed oil, stood Peterson, “Creeping Pete” himself, my former employer. Foreboding hit me like lightning. When I moved on as quickly as possible from representing his funereal establishment at wakes, he had practically wept in trying to persuade me to stay on and keep up the handholding and sympathetic imbibing at those weepfests in Dublin Gulch. “You’re the best at it I’ve ever had, and there’s never any end to the Irish kicking the bucket,” he’d pleaded futilely. Now his back was mostly to me as he lugubriously polished his merchandise, but the second he turned around, I was caught there, framed full-face in the window, looking for all the world like an importuning job seeker, and I absolutely knew he would rush out with a glad cry. Meanwhile, stunned as I was, I overheard Smitty joshing the carrier of the Thunder, “News too hot to hold on to, that it?”

  “Making my rounds, is all,” Famine said with injured dignity.

  That brought a belly laugh. “Know what? That’s two of us.” From the sound of it, Smitty must have been feeling flush after his day of collecting from speakeasies to add to the stash in the warehouse and dug into his pocket. “Here, buy yourself a sody pop.”

  “A whole buck! Gee, thanks!”

  There was the bang of a door as Famine rushed into the M&M, which meant he would be right back out and I would be in his line of sight, while a whistled tune growing louder indicated Smitty was crossing the street in my direction. Creeping Pete had stepped back to scrutinize the sheen on a brass-handled casket, his eyes fixed on the accoutrements with undertakerly concern, but he had only to lift his head and there I was. In my paralyzed brain rang the prospective chorus of being discovered by not one, not two, but three sets of eyes:

  “Sir! You been following me?”

  “Boss! Boy, you’re everywhere, huh?”

  “Morgan! You’ve come back to work, thank heaven.”

  Instead, something miraculous occurred. I saw by the reflection in the funeral home window Russian Famine come charging out of the cigar store, stop short at what he saw, and shout, “Hey, mister! You dropped some bullets!”

  “Hah?” Smitty turned back, recrossing the street with alacrity. “Oh, yeah, thanks, kid. Them are just some reloads—I mean, good-luck charms I carry loose in my pocket.”

  Famine’s yell straightened up Creeping Pete with a start, craning his neck and peering right over the top of me to see what the commotion up the street was.

  And, head down and hunched over, I made myself scarce with the gait of a man who had just remembered an appointment around the corner.

  There, breathing freely at last, much the wiser about the pitfalls that went with being a window man, I made myself think through the carriage route Famine was pursuing, from start to end. I was certain he hadn’t delivered stolen information either at a brothel or one of the speakeasies, he zipped in and out of those places too fast to hold a conversation with anyone. Besides, those venues did not fit well with Cutthroat Cartwright’s elegant manner of machinations. Ahead, as far as I knew, were only deliveries to the colored doorman at the Hirbour apartment building and the last stop, Blind Heinie’s newsstand. Neither of those seemed a likely Post operative. Maybe I was flatly wrong and the youngster we all thought so highly of was not the culprit smuggling the inside skinny, as he’d have put it, to the other journalistic camp. Yet the fact stood that Cutlass was gleaning enough information from somewhere to rip me to pieces day by day. That thought spurred me on, sending me trotting up the alley that intersected the last leg of the carriage route.

  The apartment building doorman, I saw by peeking around the alley corner, was kidding Russian Famine much as Smitty had, and the boy was grinning his ears off. No subversion there, surely. After a minute, he left a bundle of papers, and with the energy of a colt in the homestretch, began pushing the baby carriage up the last block at a rattling pace. Here I had a rapid calculation to do. Blind Heinie’s newsstand was located around the corner of the Hennessy Building, its department store side, and so I shortcut through the store to where I knew I’d have a good view, unseen. Hurrying through the aisles past curious clerks, I quickly enough reached the ladies’ wear section and all but sprinted to the very same display window—the cloche-hatted mannequins, a bit worse for wear, had resumed their teacup gin party—by which Blaze and I had unorthodoxly entered the store.

  Luck was with me, I was in the nick of time to peek past the flapper dresses and see Famine park the buggy alongside the newsstand and heft out his remaining newspapers, quite a stack. Blind Heinie greeted him with something jolly I could not hear, and Famine grinned nervously. I watched him neatly arrange the pile of papers within the vendor’s easy reach, then, something I hadn’t remembered from the earlier time I accompanied him to the newsstand hutch, Famine bundled half a dozen Thunders with butcher’s twine. His fingers were quick, but not quicker than the eye. And so I saw the deed done. Watched him slip the narrow folded pages of overset proofs into the middle of the bundle before knotting it.

  Now I knew, and almost wished I didn’t. Blind Heinie counted out some money by feel from the upturned hat he used as a cash register and handed it to Famine, then the boy spy of the Thunder and—this part hurt even worse—betrayer of my editorial efforts went off pushing the empty baby carriage with one hand. Tempting as it was to rush out and confront him, caught red-handed, on a further hunch I held to my post at the display window. But no longer alone.

  “May we help you with something?” a stentorian voice addressed me from behind.

  I glanced over my shoulder to the floorwalker, boutonniere and all, evidently summoned by an alarmed clerk. “I think not. I’m merely . . . window shopping.”

  “Most people do that from outside,” he said down his nose. Suspicious but uncertain, he persisted: “Interested in dressing the little lady, are you?”

  “I suppose, when the alternative isn’t possible. I mean, no.” Nothing was happening at the newsstand except Blind Heinie digging in his ear wi
th a finger. Ominous silence behind me growing by the second, I could feel the stare of the floorwalker. My own gaze unremittingly at hem level past the soiree of shapely mannequins, I was desperate not to be thrown out of the store just yet. “Actually, what I am interested in”—it was a reach, but I got there—“are the teacups.”

  “The cups, did you say?”

  “Naturally. I’m the purchasing agent for the Purity Cafeteria and we’re always on the lookout”—keeping my eyes fixed on the newsstand—“for appropriate cupware.”

  “I see.” Cautiously the floorwalker asked, “How many?”

  “Five hundred. Saucers, too, of course.”

  The floorwalker was, well, floored. “That’s a considerable order. I’d have to check our inventory, but if we don’t have that many in stock, I’m sure we can order—”

  While he was speaking, my hunch paid off. A shirtsleeved office worker in a celluloid collar tight enough to choke, an Anaconda minion if I had ever seen one, appeared at the newsstand, said a word or two to Blind Heinie as he dropped coins into the upturned hat, grabbed up the twine-tied little bundle of Thunders, and vanished. Upstairs to the top floor, where the contents of the overset editorial proofs would be conveyed immediately to Cartwright at the Post.

  “I just remembered,” I whirled so abruptly the floorwalker, startled, reeled back, “the Purity may also need demitasse cups. I must go check.”

  “But don’t you want to put in your order for—” his voice faded plaintively behind me as I hustled down the aisle. By hotfooting through the department store and racing back down the alley from the apartment building, I had hope of cutting off Famine as he headed back to the Thunder building with the empty pram.

  It worked too well. As I whirled around the corner nearest the C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home, boy and buggy were trundling down the street directly at me. Famine practically screeched to a stop, my face giving me away. I read his guilty expression as all the confession needed. Stunned, we both were further startled by an urgent tapping on the showroom window of the funeral home. Caskets forgotten, Creeping Pete was showing actual animation, gesturing vigorously for me to stay where I was while he came out. I tried to wave him off and simultaneously deal with Russian Famine. The youngster wasn’t waiting for what I had to say. I heard again the sentence I had fantasized, only this time, full of anguish, it was not a question.

  “Sir! You been following me.”

  “I had to. Famine, listen—”

  “Morgan!” Creeping Pete popped out of the funeral home with a glad cry, alighting between us on the sidewalk, rubbing his hands together in professional habit. “You’re back! I knew you’d end up here. I have three wakes in need of a cryer and—”

  Seeing his chance, Russian Famine turned tail and bolted. As he fled, the abandoned baby buggy rolled down the steep sidewalk, accelerating rapidly straight at a befuddled Creeping Pete. With an “Oof!” he caught the runaway pram squarely in his middle, long torso splayed across it and arms clutching around it protectively, unaware there was no baby in it. “I didn’t know you were a family man, Morgan,” he panted. “Is this some sort of domestic dispute?”

  “I’ll explain some other time,” I said, taking off after the running boy. “Park it in the garage with the hearse, please, someone will be by for it.” Dodging past honking automobiles, I raced after my quarry, already a block away. “Famine, wait!” I called as loudly as I could while running. “I only want to talk to you!”

  He streaked out of sight.

  Worse, I knew exactly where he was going.

  22

  THERE MAY BE A TREK through a neighborhood of hell—I hope never to find out—similar to the abandoned part of the Hill. The dead zone, where the violated earth had yielded up all its treasure of copper. Gray waste heaps lay like nightmare dunes that knew no shifting sands, inert forever. Glory holes gaped at random in what bare ground remained on the steep hillside. Up top, the gallows frame of the Muckaroo mine reared against the sky, westernmost of the stark dozens of such headframes, silenced by the lockout, scattered across the crest of the Hill like strange spawn of Eiffel’s Parisian tower. Luck willing, those might operate again, but the Muckaroo never would. “They shut the Muck a while back,” the boyish voice echoed in me as I puffed my way up the winding haul road. There had been no time to enlist Jared and Rab nor anyone else, I alone had been confided in by an acrobatic gremlin grinning down from atop high-standing bookshelves that he climbed only dead headframes. My heart pounded with the knowledge of what a distraught and shattered youngster might do, scaling the steelwork tower girder by girder, handhold by foothold. He could fall. He could jump.

  The abandoned mine yard was fenced with sharp wire, high and formidable enough that at first I wondered whether Russian Famine had merely been bragging in saying the Muckaroo was his pick for climbing gymnastics. Wildly scanning around, I spied the narrow opening, boy size, where a gatepost had separated from the guardhouse. It was going to be the tightest of fits for me, but there was no choice. Alternately grunting and sucking in my breath to make myself as lean as possible, I squeezed sideways through the narrow gap, regretting the consequences to my suit.

  “Famine!” I shouted as soon as I wriggled in. The sound echoed emptily off the silent mine works. Bustling with hundreds of men who descended into the honeycomb of ore tunnels the last time I was unwillingly here, now the Muckaroo was a ghost town where no one had ever lived, only labored.

  The haunting last testament of this, I came face-to-face with as I rushed across the yard to the mineshaft, passing the long building that housed the lamp room where the miners, and I among them one unforgettable time, started each shift by equipping themselves with helmet lamps and other gear for working in the deepest mine tunnels on earth. Griff had been my guide in that adventure, and it was he who pointed out the markings as high as a person could reach on the outer wall of the building. “Them’s the dead,” he’d said simply and unmistakably. Chiseled into the brickwork were sharp but neat up-and-down strokes, one for each miner killed in the treacherous copper labyrinth below, with a diagonal slash completing each set of five. Every Butte mine with a fatal accident on its record, he told me, which was to say every Butte mine, displayed such gouges of death somewhere on the premises, tribute from the surviving miners to their fellow workers that no mine management dared touch. It raced through my mind that someone like Quin was doubly interred, in a cemetery grave and a groove chiseled as carefully as a jeweler’s cut. By the raw toll on the wall, an even dozen lives had been sacrificed to the Muckaroo, and it had to be my mission to make sure there was no unlucky thirteenth.

  Hastening around the corner from the lamp room, I stopped short at the spectacle of the headframe rearing over me, the spider-leg stanchions and the bracing girders at crazily ingenious angles thrusting like a colossal bridge truss with no roadway but the sky. Looking straight up to the top dizzied me, not a promising development. The steel-webbed tower stood perhaps no more than a hundred feet high, but with my apprehension of heights it appeared more like a thousand. Up there, where I could not see clearly past the crisscross of thick girders, the winding wheel that had lifted the elevator cages bearing men and copper ore was surrounded by a small platform, which could be reached by a steel ladder. But if I knew the climber involved, he spurned the ladder and was somewhere in the maze of steelwork supports, the better to defy gravity.

  I cupped my hands and called, “Famine, I know you’re up there. Come down, please, so we can talk this over. On firm ground.”

  Only the wind in the steel frame answered.

  A feeling of extreme dread setting in, this time I hollered louder. “If you’re afraid of what Jared and Mrs. Evans will do to you, don’t be. I’ll speak up for you. You won’t be punished, I promise. We’re all merely concerned for you. Shall I say it again? Come. On. Down.”

  Again, I was dickering with th
e wind.

  “Very well,” the shout I had desperately wanted not to make, “then I’m coming up.”

  That brought a strawy head of hair, startling against the black of the metal, into sight around a girder directly back under the platform. Good grief, he had climbed the entire vertical steel maze and tucked himself into an angle-iron support, to call it that, his back against the sloping strutwork and his feet idly braced against the nearest upright, like a sailor resting amid the stays and shrouds of a topmast. Open air was on every side of him, all the long way to the ground.

  “Sir,” he anxiously called down as though it was only good manners, “don’t bother. I’m just gonna jump and kill myself anyhow.”

  I put a shaky hand on the cold steel of a ladder barely wide enough to stand on, calling out as I did so, “Not until I come up and we have a talk.”

  The fair head shook vigorously at me not to. I hesitated with hand and foot still on the narrow ladder, but the threat to jump did not renew itself just yet.

  “You trying to kill yourself, too, sir?” he scolded instead. “You told me you don’t like high places, and ain’t none in Butte higher than a gallus frame, everybody knows that.”

  There was all too much truth in what he said, my twanging nerves informed me. Even from ground level there at the Muckaroo mineshaft, the city sprawled below the Hill as if it had run out of breath trying to climb to our elevation. “What’s the sense of you getting up here and falling off,” Russian Famine’s maddening logic persisted, “just because I’m gonna?”

  Rather than answer that, I began to climb, each steel rung slick under my city shoes, telling myself over and over not to look down and carrying on aloud a one-sided conversation to the effect that neither of us needed to fall off—as if that were insurance against it—and we simply had to settle things face-to-face, the situation was not as bad as he thought, and so on. I was gambling that my precarious ascent would keep him watching rather than drive him to leaping, a theory that might hold until I was up even with him. Then something else would have to be devised, and I had no idea what.