“Oh sure. Of course you are.” Sadie touched the side of her nose and winked at me.
“You tell us how we can go on strike too.” One of the girls tugged at my sleeve. She was a beautiful stately Italian called Gina and had been very upset when Paula was fired.
“Strike? Us? Why should we want to go on strike?” an older woman asked. “We have it good here. Six dollars a week and no funny business.”
“Good? You call that good?” Gina demanded. “All garment workers are treated like dreck and you know it. It’s about time we show Seedy Sam and old Mostel that they don’t rule the world.”
“This isn’t a good time to go on strike, you know,” I said hastily. “Mr. Mostel wants to start work on his new designs this week, remember.”
“Then what better time?” Gina said. “He wants to get those garments in the stores for the holidays. He’d probably agree to anything we wanted just to keep us working.”
“He could also fire the lot of you and hire new girls to replace you,” I said. “That’s what Lowenstein threatened to do. I don’t know why he gave in so quickly.”
Disappointed faces looked at me. “Are you saying we shouldn’t go on strike like the Lowenstein girls?” one of them asked. “You think we have it so good here that we should all be happy?”
“Of course not,” I said, “and I didn’t say you shouldn’t go on strike. But you have to know what you’re doing. It’s not as easy as it sounds. You need the backing of the Hebrew Trades and the other garment workers, or they’ll make mincemeat of you.”
“Mincemeat? They kill us?” one of the Italian girls asked, staring at me with huge eyes.
I laughed. “No, but they’ll threaten you. They sent the starkes to attack us and when we tried to defend ourselves, some of us got carted off to jail for causing trouble.”
“You got sent to jail? Oy vay!”
I looked around the group of expectant faces. “Look, if you really want to organize, you need to join the union. You need to choose your union representatives to go to meetings for you and get advice on how to go about your strike.”
“We already had one girl start doing that stuff, didn’t we?” Golda asked. “Remember Kathy?”
“Oh sure. Kathy.” The name went around the circle of girls.
“Kathy? Was she American?” I asked.
“No, she was English. She talked funny, like you,” one of the girls said.
“She was the greatest. She stand up to Sam and she don’t take no nonsense from him.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
Blank faces stared at me. “We don’t know,” Golda said. “She was at work one day and then she got called out of the room and she never came back.”
“We asked Sam where she had gone and he didn’t know neither,” another girl added.
“Did somebody come for her? Who called her out of the room?” I asked.
Several shrugs.
“We’re not supposed to look up when we’re working,” Sadie said. “You know how Seedy Sam likes to take our money from us.”
“I work near the door,” a bouncy little redhead called Ida said. “I saw her go past and I heard her say, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”
“But you didn’t see who it was?”
“No, but soon after that Mr. Mostel’s son came in.”
“Enough of this,” Sadie said loudly. “Kathy’s gone. All the talking in the world isn’t going to bring her back. Let’s go eat. You know Sam is just dying to dock our pay for being late again.”
Nobody could disagree with this and we surged down the street to the little café where some girls bought hot drinks to go with their sandwich and others splurged five cents on the daily special. I joined the latter and had a bowl of stew that must have been made from a tough old buffalo. As I chewed on pieces of gristle, I also tried to digest what I had just heard. So Katherine had actually disappeared in the middle of the day from Mostel’s, lured from the room by someone who came for her—someone she knew. And another interesting fact had come out—Ben Mostel had come into the room right after Kathy disappeared.
If Michael Kelly was still alive, maybe he would be able to take up the story from that point. Surely he would have found out what had happened to her, especially if he was a member of the Eastmans. Gang members always have an ear to the ground, don’t they? So my number-one priority was to find Michael Kelly. Not an easy assignment. I had no desire to follow Nell Blankenship to my doom. Maybe it was now time to shake off all notions of foolish pride and ask Daniel to help me.
That evening when I returned home, I took up pen and paper.
Dear Daniel,
I witnessed an ugly incident at a garment worker’s strike on Friday last. I think that some of the starkes were members of the Eastmans gang, and one of them looked very much like the photograph of Michael Kelly. Since I am forbidden to do any more foolish investigating in that part of town, I wondered if you could find out for me if Michael Kelly is indeed still alive.
Yours sincerely,
M. Murphy