§ 45
Peter was now in a state of utter funk. He knew that he would have to
face McGivney, and he just couldn't do it. All he wanted was Nell; and
Nell, knowing that he would want her, had agreed to be in the park at
half past eight. She had warned him not to talk to a soul until he had
talked to her. Meantime she had gone home and renewed her Irish roses
with French rouge, and restored her energy with coffee and cigarettes,
and now she was waiting for him, smiling serenely, as fresh as any bird
or flower in the park that summer morning. She asked him in even tones
how things had gone, and when Peter began to stammer that he didn't
think he could face McGivney, she proceeded to build up his courage once
more. She let him put his arms about her, even there in broad daylight;
she whispered to him to get himself together, to be a man, and worthy of
her.
What had he to be afraid of, anyway? They hadn't a single thing
on him, and there was no possible way they could get anything. His hands
were clean all the way thru, and all he had to do was to stick it out;
he must make up his mind in advance, that no matter what happened, he
would never break down, he would never vary from the story he had
rehearsed with her. She made him go over the story again; how on the
previous evening, at the gathering in the I. W. W. headquarters, they
had talked about
killing Nelse Ackerman as a means of bringing the war to an end. And
after the talk he had heard Joe Angell whisper to Jerry Rudd that he had
the makings of a bomb already; he had a suit-case full of dynamite
stored there in the closet, and he and Pat McCormick had been planning
to pull off something that very night. Peter had gone out, but had
watched outside, and had seen Angell, Henderson, Rudd and Gus come out.
Peter had noticed that Angell's pockets were stuffed, and had assumed
that they were going to do their dynamiting, so he had phoned to
McGivney from the drug-store. By this phoning he had missed the crowd,
and then he had been ashamed and afraid to tell McGivney, and had spent
the night wandering in the park. But early in the morning he had found
the note, and had understood that it must have been slipped into his
pocket, and that the conspirators wanted him to come in on their scheme.
That was all, except for three or four sentences or fragments of
sentences which Peter had overheard between Joe Angell and Jerry Rudd.
Nell made him learn these sentences by heart, and she insisted that he
must not under any circumstances try to remember or be persuaded to
remember anything further.
At last Peter was adjudged ready for the ordeal, and went to Room
427 in the American House, and threw himself on the bed. He was so
exhausted that once or twice he dozed; but then he would think of some
new question that McGivney might ask him, and would start into
wakefulness. At last he heard a key turn, and started up. There entered
one of the detectives, a man named Hammett. "Hello, Gudge," said he.
"The boss wants you to get arrested."
"Arrested!" exclaimed Peter. "Good Lord!" He had a
sudden swift vision of himself shut up in a cell with those
Reds, and forced to listen to "hard luck stories."
"Well," said Hammett, "we're arresting all the Reds,
and if we skip you, they'll be suspicious. You better go
somewhere right away and get caught."
Peter saw the wisdom of this, and after a little thought he chose
the home of Miriam Yankovitch. She was a real Red, and didn't like him;
but if he was arrested in her home, she would have to like him, and it
would tend to make him "solid" with the "left wingers." He gave the
address to Hammett, and added, "You better come as soon as you can,
because she may kick me out of the house."
"That's all right," replied the other, with a laugh. "Tell
her the police are after you, and ask her to hide you."
So Peter hurried over to the Jewish quarter of the city, and
knocked on a door in the top story of a tenement house. The door was
opened by a stout woman with her sleeves rolled up and her arms covered
with soap-suds. Yes, Miriam was in. She was out of a job just now, said
Mrs. Yankovitch. They had fired her because she talked Socialism. Miriam
entered the room, giving the unexpected visitor a cold stare that said
as plain as words: "Jennie Todd!"
But this changed at once when Peter told her that he had been to
I. W. W. headquarters and found the police in charge. They had made a
raid, and claimed to have discovered some kind of plot; fortunately
Peter had seen the crowd outside, and had got away. Miriam took him into
an inside room and asked him a hundred questions which
he could not answer. He knew nothing, except that he had
been to a meeting at headquarters the night before, and this
morning he had gone there to get a book, and had seen the
crowd and run.
Half an hour later came a bang on the door, and Peter dived under
the bed. The door was burst open, and he heard angry voices commanding,
and vehement protests from Miriam and her mother. To judge from the
sounds, the men began throwing the furniture this way and that; suddenly
a hand came under the bed, and Peter was grabbed by the ankle, and
hauled forth to confront four policemen in uniform.
It was an awkward situation, because apparently these policemen
hadn't been told that Peter was a spy; the boobs thought they were
getting a real dynamiter! One grabbed each of Peter's wrists, and
another kept him and Miriam covered with a revolver, while the fourth
proceeded to go thru his pockets, looking for bombs. When they didn't
find any, they seemed vexed, and shook him and hustled him about, and
made clear they would be glad of some pretext to batter in his head.
Peter was careful not to give them such a pretext; he was frightened and
humble, and kept declaring that he didn't know anything, he hadn't done
any harm.
"We'll see about that, young fellow!" said the officer, as he
snapped the handcuffs on Peter's wrists. Then, while one of them
remained on guard with the revolver, the other three proceeded to
ransack the place, pulling out the bureau-drawers and kicking the
contents this way and that, grabbing every scrap of writing they could
find and jamming it into a couple of suit-cases. There were books with
red
bindings and terrifying titles, but no bombs, and no weapons more
dangerous than a carving knife and Miriam's tongue. The girl stood
there with her black eyes flashing lightnings, and told the police
exactly what she thought of them. She didn't know what had happened in
the I. W. W. headquarters, but she knew that whatever it was, it was a
frame-up, and she dared them to arrest her, and almost succeeded in her
fierce purpose. However, the police contented themselves with kicking
over the washtub and its contents, and took their departure, leaving
Mrs. Yankovitch screaming in the midst of a flood.
