“The business of the library is conducted upstairs, gentlemen. If you would follow me-”
My break for the door was cut off by Eel Eyes, barring my way with a coarse left hand that justified the Latin sinister. “We like it down here,” he said lazily. “Nice and private, we can have a talk.” He sized me up with a tilt of his head. “Let’s start with what brings a fancy number like you to Butte. You slipped into town real easy, didn’t you, no baggage or nothing.”
That threw me. “Just because the railroad lost my-”
“You’re pretty slick,” Eel Eyes gave me credit I did not want. “But you can’t pull the wool over Ty and me. We get paid good dough to be on the lookout for wise guys like you. Some gold-plated talker who just shows up out of nowhere,” his tone was mocking, “if you know the sort. And sure enough, you no sooner hit town and that Red songbook starts doing its stuff at those burying parties. Then you latch on at this joint, where all kinds of crackpots come out at night. It all adds up to one thing, don’t you think, chum?”
This was a nightmare. “I can explain every one of those-”
“I bet you can, fancy-pants.” He leered at me. “After what happened to the last organizer for that Red pack of Wobblies, you have to come sneaking into town all innocent-like, don’t you. You can maybe fool those stupid miners up on the Hill, but Ty and me got you pegged.”
“One of them outside infiltrators, yeah.” Tolliver’s belated utterance unnerved me a great deal more than anything from the other goon. His conversation came off the top of his head and out his mouth seemingly without passing through his brain. It was as if he had speaking apparatus on the outside of his head, like English plumbing.
“I am a denomination of one,” I protested hotly, “employed by no one but this library, whose gainful work you are keeping me from. Now if you will accompany me upstairs, I can lead you to someone who will set you straight about-”
Typhoon Tolliver took a flatfooted step and planted himself in front of me. “You look like somebody, under that face spinach. Ain’t we met somewhere?”
“Surely I would recall such a mishap.”
“Don’t get smart on us.” He loomed in on me. “You been somewhere I been, I just know it. Chicago, how about?”
Here was where family resemblance was a danger. I looked like my brother, whose face had appeared on boxing posters on every brick wall in that city. Maximum as my mustache was, it amounted to thin disguise if someone concentrated hard enough on the countenance underneath to come up with the name Llewellyn. Goons do business with other goons, and this pair would not waste a minute in transacting me to the Chicago gambling mob. Which meant I was a goner, if Tolliver’s slow mental gears managed to produce the recognition he was working at.
I snapped my fingers. “Aha! The World’s Fair, of course! The African native village and the big-eyed boys that we were.” Wiggling my eyebrows suggestively, I took a chance and leaned right into the meaty face. “The bare-breasted women of the tribe, remember?”
Tolliver blushed furiously. “Every kid in Chi was there looking.”
“We know of two, don’t we, although the passage of the years has dimmed my recollection of you more than yours of me.”
“Yeah, well, sure, what do you expect, a mug like yours-”
“Knock it off, both of you.” The one with those aquarium eyes moved in on me. “Let’s try another angle on what kind of four-flusher you really are. What did you do in the war?”
“I was elsewhere.”
“Like where?”
“Tasmania.”
“Say it in English when you’re talking to us,” Tolliver warned.
“It’s in Australia, stupe,” the other one rasped. “And you weren’t in any rush to come back and enlist, is that it? You look like a quitter if I ever saw one. No wonder this country is full up with pinkoes and-”
“Infiltrators,” Tolliver recited mechanically.
“-and stray cats from half the world and-” The lesser thug’s yammering broke off and he eyed me suspiciously. “What’re you cocking your head like that for?”
“Just listening for the clink of your own medals.”
You find concern for reputation in strange places. The pointy face reddened to the same tint Tolliver’s had. “I kept the peace here at home.”
“I can imagine.”
“Hey, punk, a smart aleck like you can end up in a glory hole if you don’t watch your-”
Swish, and then bang! All three of us jumped.
Samuel Sandison towered in the doorway, the flung-open door still quivering on its hinges behind him. “What’s this? The idlers’ club in session?”
All at once there was more breathing room around me, both goons stepping back from the perimeter of authority Sandison seemed to bring with him. What was I seeing? He was twice their age, and though of a size with Tolliver, no physical match. Yet the two burly interlopers now looked very much like spooked schoolboys. Why the white-faced wariness all of a sudden?
Sandison’s ice-blue gaze swept over them and onto me, and I blinked innocently back. “We’re only here because this helper of yours is up to something,” the pointy-faced one was saying, not quite stammering, “and the people we work for need to know what he’s-”
“Quiet!” Sandison boomed, the word resounding in the enclosed room. “You tell them on the top floor of the Hennessy Building that they maybe run everything else in town, but not this library. Clear out of here, and I mean now.”
The pair cleared out, but not without glares over their beefy shoulders at me.
Now all I faced was the stormcloud of beard. Sandison inspected me as if having missed some major feature until then. “Miss Runyon told me you were taking an unconscionably long time down here. Morgan? Are you up to something?”
“Sandy, I swear to you, I am an utter stranger to the battles of Butte.” That left Chicago out of it.
He shook his head. “If you weren’t such a bookman, I wouldn’t have you on the payroll for more than a minute.” Turning to go, he said, as if he was ordering me to head off a stampede: “Get the damn corkboard rigged up so we don’t have to hear any more from that old heifer Runyon about it.”
I PICKED AT MY FOOD that suppertime, drawing a look of concern from Grace. “More turkey, Morrie? It’s not like you to be off your feed.”
Down the table, two sets of bushy gray eyebrows squinched in similar regard of me. Neither Hoop nor Griff asked anything about my disturbing day, however, in respect of our pact not to bother Grace’s head about the goons’ interest in me. Pushing away my plate, I alibied: “A touch of stomach disorder, is all. Nothing a restful evening in my room can’t fi x, I’m sure.”
Upstairs, flat on my back atop the dragon coverlet while I stared at the ceiling and waited for inspiration of some sort to show up, I never felt less sure of fi xing anything. The zigzags of life were more puzzling than ever. There I lay, in the most comfortable circumstances I had known for a long while, with work that nicely employed my mind, and the goons of the world were sure I was a secret operative for the most radical wing of the laboring class. It was dizzying. If America was a melting pot, Butte seemed to be its boiling point. The Richest Hill was turning out to be also a Cemetery Ridge of copper to be fought over, and some trick of fate had dumped Morris Morgan-all right, Morgan Llewellyn-right in the middle of it. Not the spot I thought I was choosing when I stepped down from that train.