At twenty to twelve, two buses that had seen a lot of better years pulled up around the corner. "Here we go," Chester said softly. It had been a long, long time-half a lifetime-since he'd shot at anybody, but he knew he could. Nobody who'd been through the Great War was likely to forget what gunplay was all about.
Here came the Pinkerton men. They looked like goons: drunks and toughs and guys down on their luck who'd take anybody's money and do anything because they hadn't had any real work for such a long time. They carried a motley assortment of iron bars and wooden clubs. One guy even had what Martin belatedly recognized as a baseball bat, something far, far from its New England home. Others, grim purpose on their faces, kept one hand out of sight. Knife men and shooters, Martin thought, and made sure he could get at his own pistol in a hurry.
"We don't want any trouble, now," said a Torrance policeman with the map of Ireland on his face. He and his pals formed a thin line between the advancing goons and the picketers, who were shaping a line of their own: a skirmish line. Chester warily watched the scabs on the site. If they took his men from behind while the Pinkertons hit them from the front… He grimaced. That wouldn't be good at all.
As if reading his mind, Mazzini said, "I told a couple of our guys to start shooting at the scabs if they even take a step towards us. Some bullets go past their heads, I don't think they've got the balls to keep coming."
Chester laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. "Good. Thanks."
A short, scrawny, ferret-faced man in a loud, snappy suit seemed to be the Pinkertons' commander. "Time to teach these damn Reds a lesson," he said in a voice that carried. Low growls rose from his men, as if from a pack of angry dogs. He pointed. "Go get 'em!"
Instead of growling, the goons roared and charged. Some of the Torrance cops swung their billy clubs. Most of them let the Pinkertons go by. The union men roared, too. They were outnumbered, but not too badly. Some of them ran forward to meet the goons head on. A few others hung back, watching the scabs.
"Here we go!" Chester said, an odd note of exultation in his voice. He snatched up a club and waded into the brawl. He didn't want to start shooting first, but he had nothing at all against breaking a few heads.
He almost got his broken as soon as he started fighting. A goon carrying an iron bar with a chunk of concrete on the end swung it for all he was worth. It hummed past Chester's ear. He clobbered the Pinkerton before the fellow could take another swing at him.
That scrawny guy in the sharp suit didn't mix it up along with the strikebreakers he'd brought. He stayed out of the fight and yelled orders. Martin pointed at the man with his club. "Get him!" he yelled to one of the Torrance cops, who'd managed to whack his way clear and was standing on the sidewalk as if it were the sideline of a football game. The cop paid him no attention.
But when the union men started getting the better of the strikebreakers, their boss was the one who first pulled a pistol out of his pocket. Chester tried to shift his club to his left hand so he could grab his own gun, but a goon had hold of his left arm. In desperation, he threw the club instead. He got lucky. It caught the fellow in the sharp suit right in the bridge of the nose.
He let out a howl that pierced the shouts and curses of the brawling men in front of him, dropped the pistol, and clapped both hands to his face. When he took them away a moment later, he had a mustache made of blood.
He bent for the pistol. But the Daily Breeze photographer, not content to stay neutral, dashed up and grabbed it. Screaming, "You fucker!" the Pinkertons' boss jumped on him. They had their own private brawl till the reporter from the local paper weighed in on the photographer's side. Then the little guy with the gaudy clothes took his lumps.
So did his goons. Thanks to Martin and that photographer, nobody started shooting. Chester knew how lucky that was. The union men drove the toughs back to their buses in headlong retreat. A rock smashed the windshield on one of the buses. Both drivers got out of there a lot faster than they'd come.
The next morning, the Times called it "a savage labor riot." The Daily Breeze knew better. So did Chester. He also knew the union had won a round. They wouldn't see the Pinkertons for a while-but when they did, the other side would be loaded for bear.
XIX
The Sweet Sue jounced west across the rough waters of the Atlantic, back toward Boston harbor. George Enos Jr. stood near the bow of the fishing boat, thinking about things that had changed and things that hadn't. He turned to Carlo Lombardi, who was smoking a cigarette beside him. "Back in 1914," George said, "my old man was coming home from a fishing run. He didn't have a wireless set on his ship. When he got back into port, he found out that goddamn Serb had blown up the Austrian archduke and his wife, and everything was going to hell."
Lombardi paused to take another drag before he answered, "We're lucky. We can find out everything's going to hell before we get into port. Ain't life grand nowadays?"
"Yeah. Grand." George tried to look every which way at once. "Of course, it's liable not to be the wireless that tells us."
"How do you mean?" the other fisherman asked, scratching his head.
"If a war starts, you've got to bet the Confederates'll have their submarines up here ahead of time. Only stands to reason, right?" George said. "If they do, first thing we'll know about it is-wham!"
"Fuck," Lombardi said, and pitched his cigarette into the green water. He eyed George sourly. "You bastard. Now you're going to have me looking around for a periscope or a goddamn torpedo all the way till we tie up at T Wharf."
"Yeah, well, I've been doing that ever since we started back from the Grand Bank," George said. "That sneaky Confederate son of a bitch torpedoed my father after the last war was done. It'd be just like one of those bastards to nail me before this one even starts."
"Fuck," Lombardi said again, and gave George an even more jaundiced once-over. "You better not be a goddamn Jonah, that's all I've got to say."
"My old man was the one with the bad luck," George said. The other man thought that over, then slowly nodded. If he didn't believe it, he kept it to himself. George went on, "Maybe there won't be a war this time around. Maybe. I keep on hoping there won't, anyway."
"I hope for free pussy, too, when I go to a whorehouse," Lombardi said, lighting another cigarette. "I hope for it, but that ain't how things work." He sucked in smoke. "Better not be another war. If there is, the tobacco'll all be shitty. My pa used to bitch about that all the goddamn time, how lousy the smokes were 'cause we couldn't get no Confederate tobacco."
George didn't remember whether his father had complained about bad tobacco. He'd been too little when George Enos Senior got killed, and his father had been away at sea too much while alive to leave behind a lot of memories. George did recall one night when his father kept asking if he and Mary Jane were ready to go to bed yet. He hadn't been ready, and his indignation still rankled across a quarter of a century.
All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, he started laughing like hell. "What's so goddamn funny?" Lombardi asked.
"Nothing, not really," George answered. The other fisherman gave him a particularly fishy stare. He didn't care. It wasn't the sort of joke he could explain. Just the same, he suddenly understood why his father had kept wanting him to go to bed, which he hadn't when he was a little boy. He was liable to use that same impatient tone of voice to find out if his own boys were ready to go to sleep so he could be alone with Connie. As a matter of fact, he knew damn well he'd used that tone of voice with them before.