The Daredevils by Gary Amdahl

Author:Gary Amdahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619027664
Publisher: Soft Skull Press

Vera and Charles sat in a windowless room about as big as a sleeping berth in a railcar, stood on its end (for the ceiling was very high); what little space there was to move around in was taken up by filing cabinets and boxes, from which paper spilled like water. If you bumped into something, paper sloshed about you. A stack of newspapers had risen perilously close to the gas lamp on the wall. Charles guessed it was mildew that he smelled. The man on the other side of the tiny desk—on which he had cleared something like a tunnel through which he might address them—was a representative of the Nonpartisan League, an organization founded in North Dakota, where they’d had spectacular success, winning control of the state legislature, but were now running afoul of businessmen seizing the opportunity of the war to assert “preparedness” and holler “sedition.” He was outlining their grievances, which Vera jotted down on an IWW notepad.

Charles brought her wherever he went as a supervisor for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, claiming she was his secretary, for no other reason than he wanted to see what would happen if anybody someday happened to identify her as the Vera Kolessina who had been implicated in the Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco and other assorted murders. He was ready to say he had “turned” her, that she was no longer “an anarchist” and wanted only to help the state save the lives of innocent people. She was in fact “known,” by persons such as this man from the NPL, to be representing the Chicago Wobblies, and this made some interviewees uneasy: he, for instance, had been dealing with Detroit Wobblies, but Detroit Wobblies, Vera assured him, had sticks up their asses. “They say you Chicago people are grandstanders,” said the NPL man. “The Detroit people say that,” said Vera, “precisely because they have those sticks up their asses. If you want to play chess, go to Detroit. If you want to get out of the mess you’re in, talk to me.”

The man looked nervously at Charles. He was there, they told him—and “believed it” themselves as well—as a secret agent. He wasn’t really there. He was really and truly working for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety and the Chicago IWW, who really and truly had no quarrel with each other, at least while the war was on. He would be inside, privy to any plans regarding the NPL—which was just more evidence that Chicago wasn’t fooling around while Detroit was complaining that their coffee was always served lukewarm. He was an extraordinarily influential person, despite his youth. There was a town named after him in North Dakota, and he knew Teddy Roosevelt. He might someday be president of the United States! Crazier things had happened. And his sympathies were with working people. He was doing real work, field work, because it was believed it was time, just as it had been time for Henry V, to be awakened and despise his former dreams.

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