In nearly four years, nobody had discovered that the perpetrator of the explosion was Harry Pakenow, one-time economics student, and by far the most active and aggressive member of a society called Young American Workers. To Harry, the capitalist institutions of Wall Street had been, and still were, a grotesque affront to the working men of America. Behind those facades, fat and uncaring, the capitalists gorged themselves on fine foods at the expense of the ordinary man. Harry still felt angry when he thought of all those workers who had been unjustly arrested and imprisoned under suspicion of being "sinister and subversive agitators'. He had been to Boston in 1920 after one of Palmer's raids and seen how a hundred men had been kept prisoner in a bull-pen measuring thirty feet by twenty-four feet for a whole week; and he had read in the papers how men from Hartford had been beaten by police and humiliated in front of their families. All because they were suspected Reds.
Harry wasn't violent by nature. He had never punched anyone, not very hard anyway, and he was always telling Janice that he would much rather argue than fight. Janice, of course, had no idea of what he had done, or why. But when he was a boy, Harry had seen his father sacked from his job at the Nagel shoe factory for going to listen Eugene Debs preaching socialism from his "Red Special" train, in the marshalling yard at Paterson; and he had known the meaning of Wobbly before he had understood long division. Harry came from tough stock. His father had worked hard and well, cutting leather patterns for Oxford brogues, but had believed implicitly in the Wobblies" uncompromising slogan, "Good Pay Or Bum Work'. His mother had kept the family together, God knows how, when there was no money and no credit and nothing left to hock. Harry always ate a rasher of bacon for breakfast these days, because when he was a boy there had never been any bacon, ever. He had seen a newspaper cartoon in 1912 of "Capitalism" in the shape of a grossly distended hog sprawling over the mines and the factories and the legislatures of America, and he had promised himself, tight-fisted, that as soon as he could afford to buy bacon he would personally devour that hog, slice by slice.
He put away his papers and his tin box, straightened the bedcover, and then went into the kitchen to put on the kettle for a fresh cup of tea. He could make tea like an Englishman now: warming the thick brown china teapot first, then adding one teaspoonful of tea per person, and one for luck. It seemed strange that he would probably never come back to England again, even if he survived.
His Arcadia plan had come to him almost a year ago, when she had been launched from John Brown's shipyard on the Clyde. The Arcadia had been described in Keys Shipping advertising as "the last word in de luxe travel ... a city afloat, in which the scintillating manners and style of high society of both continents will be the order of the day, and of the night..." A first-class suite, one way, would be priced at $4,118, a couple of hundred dollars more than the Aquitania.
When Harry had read about the dancing and the parties and the luxury foods that would be taken aboard for each voyage, he had felt bitter to the point of illness. He had left his supper of herring and boiled potatoes untouched. It wasn't that he was personally jealous of the rich. He didn't crave luxury for himself. It was simply that he couldn't bear the manifest injustice of one man, in one meal, pushing into his face food that would have fed a whole working-class family for a whole day; and spending on a week's accommodation the same amount of money that would have enabled that same family to buy their apartment outright and live rent-free for the rest of their lives.
The kettle started to boil and he made his pot of tea. Outside in the yard, the woman from upstairs was unpegging her sheets. Her grey-streaked hair flapped in the breeze, and her face looked impossibly careworn, as creased as the tissue-paper they used for wrapping shoes in. He thought it was both sad and strange that she would still be here, pegging and unpegging these sheets, long after he had gone.
He didn't particularly want to be a martyr, but he knew what he ad to do. He had to strike again at the heart of capitalism, violently and expressively. The junction of Wall Street and Broad Street had been the very nub of capitalism on land; the Arcadia symbolised it on the high seas.
Janice had sensed that Harry had changed in recent weeks, become tenser, as the date for the maiden voyage came nearer. But she had never sought explanations from him. He would miss Janice, in the same way that he would miss the narrow Victorian streets of Bootle, and the meat pies, and the warm beer at twopence a pint. He would miss the rain. England had a kind of gritty reality about it that he had never experienced anywhere else, even in Hoboken. You were allowed to be as mad as you liked in England, and nobody cared. That was what made it so real; you could keep your own sense of reality intact, no matter how potty that sense of reality actually might be.
He had not yet made up his mind how real the moment was going to be when he detonated thirty sticks of dynamite in the cargo hold of the Arcadia, but it was enough for him to know that he was going to do it.
The woman from upstairs tapped on the window and said, "Harry, love? Are you going out this morning?"
He raised his mug. "After my tea."
"Would you get us a packet of five Woodys, please? I'll pay you Thursday."
He paused, sipped his tea, and then said, "Okay." He rather liked the idea that he wouldn't be here to collect his money.
It was beginning to shower with rain as he banged the front door of the house behind him and started to walk down the road. He wore a brown tweed cap and a thin brown overcoat with a belt. The rain speckled his glasses. On the corner, an old man sitting on a front-garden wall waiting for the Liverpool motor-bus said, "Aye up."
Harry thought about Janice as the bus ground its way slowly southward down the wet lengths of Stanley Road and Scotland Road. He had met Janice his first week in England, in the comb and brush department of Wavertree's, the gloomy Edwardian department store him she still worked. He had been making his way from counter to counter stocking up with all of those things that he had left behind in New York when he escaped. Toothbrush, shirt, pyjamas, socks. The Young American Workers had got up a collection and given him $108 getaway money.
Janice had been living at home with her mother then, after leaving her new husband of only three weeks. She was only just twenty now; she had been a chubby seventeen when she had been taken to the altar of St. Matilda's Church by a nineteen-year-old butcher's assistant to become Mrs. Philip Snowball.
Philip Snowball's idea of what a wife should expect out of married life had been washing and ironing his shirts, cooking his tea, and staying at home darning his mustard-soled socks while he went out in the evening and got so drunk that he vomited into the fireplace. He had never touched her, Philip Snowball, not once. He probably hadn't even known what to do.
Harry, isolated in Liverpool, worried, confused, had asked Janice to step out with him just for the sake of having someone young and friendly to talk to. He had taken her to a restaurant and bought a a pork chop with apple stuffing, and a cup of tea. She had never met a man as gentle and yet as individual as him before. That night, back at her mother's house, with no light but the glow of the dying coals on the kitchen range, and no perfume but the lingering sprats from her old dad's supper, they had made love sitting on a plain wooden chair, she with her plump thighs wide apart, he with his eyes tight shut and his spectacles on the table next to the cheese.