第10章 Sabotage in the Composing Room

Cormac smelled the fire before he saw it. He was walking up Rookery Row at half past eleven, coming from the assembly hall where the men had voted — narrowly, with Scanlon and his friends abstaining — to accept the heiress's offer of a trust, when the smell came to him out of the cold: not the honest smell of coal smoke and paper that hung over the district at all hours, but something sharper, the smell of oil burning. He ran. The composing room was on the second floor, above the press-room, and when he reached the door the smoke was already rolling down the stairs in a black tongue. He went up anyway, three steps at a time, with his coat over his mouth, and found the room full of men beating at a fire with their own coats, and in the middle of it, on the stone floor where the cases of type were kept, a spreading pool of burning oil. The fire was not in the machine. That was the first thing he understood, and the second thing was worse. The fire had been set. There was a tin can on its side by the door, and the oil had been poured in a line from the cases to the great wooden rack where thousands of sorts were stored, and if the rack had caught, the whole floor and every man on it would have gone up like a torch. "Water," Cormac shouted. "Sand, not water, get the sand from the press-room, and someone open the windows before we suffocate." They got it out. It took twenty minutes and every coat in the room and the sand from the barrels by the presses, and when it was done the composing room reeked and the men stood coughing in the doorway and one of them had burned his arm to the elbow and Cormac had burned both his hands and did not notice yet. "You were watched tonight," Brogan said. He was gray with smoke and leaning on the doorframe, and he looked at Cormac with an expression that Cormac had never seen on him before: the expression of a man who has seen his own trade nearly burn and knows exactly who set the fire. "Two men came up the back stairs while the vote was being taken. Nobody saw their faces. They left a can and a length of fuse." "Gresham," Cormac said. "What?" "Gresham. The works manager." Cormac had been turning it over in his mind for a week, ever since the first time he saw the man's name on a payroll slip in the account book. "He is the only man in this building who holds a key to the composing room and answers to Thorndike. He has been telling the men the machines will make them all rich. And there is a matter of one hundred and twelve dollars he cannot account for in the press-room expenses." He looked at his own hands then, and saw the red on them, and set the matter aside. "Do not say it aloud. If we accuse him without proof, he will have me arrested for the fire. That is exactly how this is done." "Then what do we do?" "We find the proof," Cormac said, "and we do it before the men decide to find Gresham themselves." --- They found it in the morning, and they found it partly because of the heiress. Cornelia had come to the building at seven, before any of the office men, with the account book under her arm, and had gone down to the works office and asked the clerk, quietly, whether the press-room expenses had been entered in the manager's own hand. Cormac stood in the doorway and watched her do it, and watched the clerk's discomfort, and understood that she had learned, in three weeks, the first lesson of every editor he had ever known: that the man who writes the numbers is the man who knows the truth, and that men write their numbers very badly when they are stealing. The clerk produced the slips. The one hundred and twelve dollars had gone, in the manager's hand, to a man named Gormley who ran an agency of private detectives, and beside the entry was a note in Gresham's own writing: *For services in the matter of the assembly — on account.* "That," Cormac said, "is the proof." "Then we have him," Cornelia said. "Then we have him," Cormac said, "and that is the trouble." He explained, standing there in the cold office with the burned smell still in the air and the clerk pretending not to listen. If they took the slip to the law, Gresham would say it was for guarding the building against strikers, which was the plainest lie in the world and yet an impossible one to disprove in a court that had never once in its history believed a labor man against a manager. If they printed it, Selwyn would print the next day that the Clarion was slandering a loyal employee to cover its own failure to control its workers. And if they did nothing, Gresham would try again. "So what do we do?" Cornelia said. "We print it," Cormac said, "and we print his own handwriting with it, and we let the men of the Row read the man who hired detectives to burn their trade out from under them. And then we let the men decide. That is the only court that has ever given us a verdict we could keep." She looked at him then, with the account book in her hands and the yellow gas light on her face, and she smiled for the first time since the bank on Nassau Street — a small, dangerous, entirely conspiratorial smile that he would remember for a long while afterward, and had no business remembering at all. "Then let us go and set the type," she said, "before the day shift comes in." They set the story together, and it took them until the day shift came in. It was strange work, and Cormac found it stranger than he expected. He had written a thousand things for other men to print and had never once stood at the case and chosen the sorts himself, and the heiress turned out to be faster at it than he was, because she had spent a winter learning the trade from Brogan and could find a letter in the case without looking. When he made an error she reached past him and set it right without a word, and when she made one he did the same, and by the third hour they had stopped apologizing for each other's mistakes and had begun to work as two men work who have done the same job long enough to say nothing at all. "You are quick," he said once. "I have had to be," Cornelia said. "I am the only person in this city who wants my father's paper to survive, and there is no one to be quick for me." She set a line and read it. "There is something I have been meaning to ask you since the assembly room, and I have not asked it because I did not know how to say it without sounding like the owner of a company." "Ask it." "When this is over," she said, "and the strike is settled, and Thorndike has done whatever he is going to do, what will you do?" Cormac set the last line of the story and did not look at her. "That depends," he said, "on whether there is anyone left in this trade who will have me." And that was how Cormac Kavanagh, organizer of the Pressmen's Assembly, came to be standing at a compositor's case in a burned room at eight in the morning, setting the story of his own enemy with the woman who paid his enemies, and finding, to his considerable surprise, that he was happy. ---