“Do you think you could get us a complete list?”
He shrugged. “Easier if I just let ’em know you’re looking for them. Plus there’s nothing written down that way.”
“You didn’t work for her, did you?” Li asked.
“You crazy? I still won’t go down there.”
“So how’d she get the others to go?”
“Easy.” Louie laughed and his eyes widened in the white circles left by his cutting goggles. “She paid union scale. She actually put a sign up at pit bottom saying she’d pay scale. Wish I could have seen Haas’s face when he read it.”
“How’d she know what union scale was?” Li asked, knowing the answer already.
Louie shrugged his massive shoulders.
Li glanced behind her to make sure the miner who’d gone off to piss was still out of earshot. “Was this a union project? Was there an official push on it?”
Louie caught her drift instantly. The union pushed members toward specific cutting faces or veins depending on its own often obscure political or economic goals. Union approval of Sharifi’s project would have meant better-qualified, more highly motivated workers. Union workers. And union oversight, even if the cat-and-mouse game of union and management meant that no one could risk publicly admitting they were union. Had Sharifi been politically savvy enough to know that? Or had the union approached her on its own initiative?
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Louie said, looking fixedly at Li. There was a message in his stare, but whatever it was she couldn’t read it.
“But you might have heard something.”
“Some things I try not to hear.”
“Who’s the pit rep?” Li asked.
Louie’s face shut like a slamming door.
“Oh, come on!” McCuen sounded exasperated. “You know goddamn well who the pit rep is. It was your damn brother two elections ago!”
Louie stared at McCuen, and Li could see half a lifetime of distrust and resentment in his broad face. “All I know,” he said, “is that you pull your paycheck out of Haas’s back pocket just like the rest of the Pinkertons. And if you think I’m going to roll over just because we—”
“Fine,” Li interrupted; she could hear footsteps moving toward them up the drift. “Just drop a word in the right ears, okay?”
“Right.” Louie bent to check his lamp. “See you around, Brian.”
“Thanks for nothing,” McCuen snapped.
Louie’s reply was so quiet Li barely heard it over the shovels of the cutter crew. She bent over him. “What?”
“I said talk to the priest. Just don’t tell him I sent you.”
The priest’s name was Cartwright, and it took them half the shift to find him. He’d scrawled his mark on the shift log when he came in that morning, but he hadn’t checked out a Davy lamp and they didn’t see his numbered tag on any of the gangway boards.
“Independents,” McCuen said. “They’re so damn sure the company’s going to steal their strikes, they’d rather die than tell the safety crews where to look for them. We’ll just have to go out and hunt him down. If you think it’s worth it.” He looked doubtful.
“You know him?” Li asked.
“Sure,” McCuen said. “Everyone does.” He made a circling gesture near his temple with one finger: crazy.
The rest of the shift ran together in a blur of dripping walls and flickering lamplight. They soon passed beyond the AMC-wired sections of the mine and into regions lit only by miners’ lamps and the occasional battery-powered emergency bulb. They poked their way up crooked drifts and adits, past brattices too rotten to push more than a whisper of fresh air through the dank tunnels. At each turning of the way they stopped and listened and followed the echoes of miners’ picks.
They relived the same ghostly scene ten, twelve, fifteen times. They caught the first faint tapping of rock hammers, glimpsed refracted lamplight glittering on the hewn and splintered walls. Then men emerged from the darkness, speared on the narrow beams of Davy lamps, their eyes glittering like coal under running water.
“The priest?” Li would ask. “Cartwright?”
And each little clot of men would send them on deeper, into smaller tunnels.
As the ventilation faltered, the air grew hotter. Soon Li was sweating, straining just to pull enough air through the mouthpiece of her rebreather. McCuen rolled his coveralls down, tied the arms around his waist, and took his shirt off. Li did the same, but left her T-shirt on; she still had a string of pearls from her underground days, and she’d just as soon not spark awkward questions about whether a certain Catherine Li had worked underground and who had known her back then.
She soon gave up even trying to check their progress against the AMC maps in her database. They were off company maps here, and besides, her reception was going. Late in the day a last team of miners pointed them into a steep, narrow drift that followed the Wilkes-Barre vein as it dipped along the broken strata at the mountains’ edge. Twenty meters up they hit a sharp kink in the drift. Just beyond the turning, they found a narrow little slit between two canted layers of bedrock, leaving just enough room for a thin person to squeak through into a dark tunnel beyond—a tunnel far too cramped to accommodate a miner in full safety gear. Someone had chalked a symbol at the mouth of the tunneclass="underline" a crescent moon with a cross under it.
“Cartwright’s sign,” McCuen said. “But no rebreather. I guess he doesn’t carry one.”
So Cartwright was a genetic. Of course he would be, Li realized. An unaltered miner might take off his rebreather in order to keep up with the pace of work at the face, but only a genetic would risk going into the more remote tunnels without a supply of clean air to breathe if he ran into a gas pocket. “How many of the bootleggers are genetics these days?” she asked McCuen.
“Most,” McCuen answered, confirming her half guess half memory. “Who else could get into this stuff? Plus they have an edge on the rest of us; they don’t have to buy air from the company.”
Li sat down, bracing herself against an outcropping of bedrock, and started to unstrap her rebreather. “Let’s go find him,” she said.
McCuen hesitated. “Maybe we should wait.”
“What the hell for?”
When McCuen didn’t answer, she looked up into his face and saw something she’d seen in more young faces than she could remember: fear.
She smiled reassuringly. “This level’s clean, Brian. Just look at your Spohr badge. We’ll be up there, what… twenty minutes? Nothing you breathe in twenty minutes is going to kill you. You’d do yourself as much harm smoking a pack of cigarettes.”
“You’ve never seen anyone die of black-lung.” McCuen’s voice rang hollow on the last word.
Li shook her head, pushed away the memories McCuen’s words had shaken loose. “No one’s going to die of anything,” she said.
A moment later McCuen spat out his mouthpiece and she heard the quiet snick of the power switch on his rebreather.
They squeezed through the slit in the rock and started up the passage. It climbed steeply, following the bed of an underground stream. The water was fresh, without a trace of sulfur, and Li splashed some over her sweaty face and neck. Cartwright must have some strike up there to make this commute worthwhile.
Soon they were climbing what amounted to a ladder, moving from handhold to handhold across rocks slippery with water. Li’s breath came quicker and shorter as they climbed, though whether it was from exertion or bad air she couldn’t guess. After what seemed like forever, the passage leveled off, the stream now running in a shallow trench to one side of them.
Li twisted around in the narrow space, jammed her back against one wall, her feet against the other. McCuen did the same, though the passage was far more cramped for him. He was panting, quick and shallow as a hound dog, and the flame of his headlamp was tipped with a ghostly blue spark. Li sniffed, and smelled the telltale whiff of violets. Whitedamp.