“Yes?” confirmed Owl querulously.
“Sixty,” repeated Jitney, not with incredulity or sarcasm but awed unbelief.
“That is,” said Owner, now with admiration but still cool, “an awfully fucking immense deal of change.”
“I TOLD YOU, YOU COCKSUCKERS!” shouted Owl in a friendly but nevertheless alarming way.
“Mahon is a decent chap,” said Owner. “He’s in town?”
“He is not,” said Owl. “He is in Washington conferring with the heads of a few other important unions.”
“And where is the money?”
“Pinkerton,” murmured Jitney, his gaze serenely focused outside the shop, on a trolley car on the far side of the intersection. “On the back step. I don’t know if he’s getting on or off. On. No. He’s getting off, he’s getting off and—”
“Quickly, then,” said Owner, moving slowly away and turning his back.
“It’s coming in an unusually circuitous fashion, and we need Farnsworth to receive it here in an unusually quiet corner,” said Jitney.
“No one knows where he is,” said Owl conversationally. “Is he in prison?” He laughed bitterly, and both Owner and Jitney let smiles pass over their faces.
“I’ll find him,” said Owner. “I’ll find Vera and Vera will find Little Billy Farnsworth, the only man among us who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.”
Owl softened and saddened perceptibly. “It’s true. And I love Billy, I truly do. He’s good and he likes getting dirty. I rode with Eugene Debs,” he went on.
“Yes, yes,” said Owner, moving another step away and lighting a cigarette to cover his unacceptable nervousness.
Owl turned to Charles as if he’d been part of the conversation all along. “On the Red Special in 1908 and we got a solid million votes. One million American socialists. Debs and I will both be in prisons before the end of the war — but I intend to bring down United Railroad before they nail me.”
Father’s well-known hatred of URR may have had a great deal to do with the apparent ease in which Charles had become part of the general group — along with the nasty Sicilian boys — if not in the know. Or it may have had very little to do with it. No one seemed terribly interested in oaths and the cover of darkness. He had been in the shop two or three times, getting rid of his motorcycles. but had Vera been there all along, watching him, wondering if she might audition.?
Owner was counting money in the till but could not help turning and shouting with a great flashing smile, “SIXTY!”
“Mr. Minot!” Owner slammed the register shut and turned his attention to Charles, who bowed perceptibly but not dramatically.
“Are you here to give me the Merkel?”
“Yes, I am. And the Minerva.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Minot. Would you repeat what you just said, sir? Days and nights of internal combustion have weakened my ears as well as my eyes. My nerves are shot and I can hardly walk a straight line. Everything tastes of oil and my fingers are numb from the vibrations.”
“I say I am here to sell you the Merkel and the Minerva.”
“Ah, that’s what Oi t’ought you said.”
The men at the railing regarded Charles impassively, the Italian boys fell silent as if embarrassed. The men carrying crates stood outside smoking, and Mexican murmured to himself, apparently translating a story in the newspaper.
Charles had never looked at the photographs and advertisements papering the walls, but did so now. One caught his eye. Five men with their arms slung around each other, hanging on and sagging against each other, clowning and making faces. Rising massively behind them was the heavy lumber of the armature of a great bowl-shaped track in — he leaned closer — in Detroit. In huge white letters, ten feet high and nailed to the outermost studs, the sport’s chief attraction was spelled out: NECK AND NECK WITH DEATH. The man in the middle, upright, grinning, had either told a terrific joke or was the only sober member of the group. The other men were convulsed in hilarity, faces as blackened as if they were pretending to be a nigger minstrel banjo band, with wide, white, clean rings around their eyes where the goggles had been. Beneath the clean and sober man in the middle were the words “Daredevil Derkum and his friends are neck and neck with death — AND THEY USE OILZUM!” Derkum was a man well known in California racing, who was also a fireman on the lead engine of the Owl train that ran every night from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
“How’s your old man?” asked Owner.
“He’s fine, he’s fine, he. ” Charles said, faltering a little in the face of all the apparent knowledge of his family strangers were ready to draw on — strangers and Vera. “He’s just back from Iceland.”
“Iceland!”
“Yes, as strange as that may sound: Iceland.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Fishing.”
“Fishing! Fishing — for what sort of fish might one angle in Iceland? Let me guess, let me. grayling?”
“Umm, no, you’d think so, wouldn’t you, but interestingly enough, no, no grayling.”
“Trout, of course.”
“Browns, yes.”
“Nasty fish, the brown. Cannibal fish. That’s what I hear.”
“I think they prefer baitfish to their own, but sure, I guess that’s true to some extent,” he said with the return of his casual authority.
“German fish,” continued Owner. He winked.
“Oh yes, of course. German fish.”
“It’s in all the newspapers. A German fish and they are eating up all the good American brook trout. And they’re supposed to be inferior on the table.”
“Au bleu, with the right wine, they taste all right to me.”
There was a brief silence and then the place was roaring with laughter. When it subsided, Owner gave Charles a wry but gently consoling look. “Char,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking of earlier. The rare and mysterious arctic char.”
“Sure, lots of nice species of char. But it’s the salmon they went for.”
“Of course. Salmon. How could I forget? Salmon! So the fishing was good?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“No?”
“I mean, I haven’t heard.”
“But generally, the reputation of Iceland is.?”
“Good, yes, very good.”
“Why else go to Iceland, right?
“My father says it’s the most beautiful country in the world. Volcanoes with glaciers creaking around them. Fifty-mile-an-hour winds straight from the North Pole and you can stick your hand in a creek of nearly boiling water. They’re only just emerging from the Middle Ages, thanks ironically to the war in Europe.”
“But ironically too the war in Europe makes it a risky business to go steaming about in the northern Atlantic, does it not?”
Charles shrugged. “He likes to fish.”
“But you do not?” asked Owner. “Like to fish.”
“Oh no, I do, I do, I do very much, but I’m, uh, I’m, uh. ” Charles faltered again, inexplicably. “I’m in a play and. you know. Vera too—”
“You’re an actor,” said Owner, a bit like a lawyer.
“Yes,” Charles admitted emphatically, maybe a bit testily. “Yes, I am. Several plays, actually. A season of them. In repertory.”
“And the shows must go on.”
“That’s what they tell me. Even if the theater is burned to the ground.”
“The Savoy is a beautiful building. We were relieved to hear the damage was not great and that repair will go quickly.”
“Yes. We found the money pretty easily too. Mother finds the money. She used to sing, but she prefers now just to find the money. The insurers feel now that the fire was not caused by a firework launched by, they think, some trolley drivers who were celebrating something about San Francisco’s role in the war that one of the city commissioners said, or promised, or promised to say at some point in the near future. Or didn’t say. Promised not to say.”