“You’ll miss home too, young fellow,” the man continued.
Ray couldn’t wrap his voice around the word home. It was a fraying sweater. A shattered glass place he couldn’t patch together with glue. Shivery when the wind whistled in, with a crack in the window. Mismatched dishes and a note telling her he was gone.
The man soon found a more willing conversationalist across the aisle and ladled his attention on her. Ray was left to peacefully regret every decision he had made in the past year, while the winking sun spilled in through the broad window and the world swished by.
On cool nights, Jem wore several layers just to keep comfortable. What would happen in the winter? With a baby? He didn’t want Jem to have the scrape-by life he had seen so often in Toronto flophouses or the Ward. If he continued to send more money than he could afford to Viola and Luca, the Ward might just be their fate.
He took out his journal and his watch. Jem usually kept the watch near her,? but she had left it on the bureau, and it was the only thing he could think of to pawn if he needed a few dollars. He refused to take any piece of her small jewelry collection as collateral—not that it would get much anyway. There was sentimental attachment in the watch for sure, but he thought she would understand—at least more than she would understand his taking off without a good-bye and with an abrupt note, devoid of all the words he wanted to say.
He had been at the Hog when Viola called, unable to sit still at home without pacing, worrying about Jem, and he could tell his sister was near breaking. He could hear her sob before she even attempted to speak. Tony was doing something big, and men had been in and out of the flat for weeks on end. The cops were always nearby, and their street rumbled with explosions. She was terrified for Luca. Tony had left unexpectedly two nights before with no word. Leaving her with no money for rent or food. She borrowed money from a neighbor to make a telephone call, and Ray thanked God that he happened to be at his desk when she rang. He was only there because he had to clear his head after Jem went to the rally against his wishes.
Ray tried to talk Vi off her ledge, but she was sure someone was pounding on the door, and while his heart stopped and his stomach did three flip-flops, he attempted to still his quickening pulse. He didn’t hear the receiver click, but every time he called her name into the telephone, he was rewarded with silence. There was little else to do but imagine scenarios of the most dreadful kind involving her and Luca.
Now he shifted uncomfortably on a seat on the first train he could get on—having paid the luxury of a cab fare to take him home, where he could throw a bag together and leave a hastily scrawled note to Jemima and put a broken watch in his pocket.
Where might Jem be now? He couldn’t expect that she would just go for a stroll to take in the evening air or knit by the fire. She’d gone to that rally. At least they had Jasper. Ray had never appreciated his constant proximity to the girls, wherever they were, more so than now.
Thinking of Jasper, he reached into his breast pocket and extracted the small wire in its strange, blackened bow. He was leaving the country with half of the only evidence they had that the rail disasters at Bathurst and Osgoode Hall were linked.
It was a funny knot, and he held it to the sunlight, making out its careful shape. Someone had crafted this with a delicate hand and wonderful precision, knowing it would end up buried under rubble, most likely under a few corpses. Who could devote himself so blindly to a cause that had no passing thought for human life? What sort of man could be so swayed by an idea?
Unless that idea came to a profitable end. Try as he may to blink back the first name that flashed in his mind, it took residence there.
A man like Tony.
Ray groggily stepped off the train at Chicago’s Union Station, shrugging his bag over his shoulder. He had little with him, so he could easily familiarize himself with the seedier parts of the city—Tony’s world—before attempting to find a workingman’s hotel or flophouse to settle in for the indeterminate amount of time he would stay in the Windy City.
The darkest part of any city was always by the docks. This he had learned quickly as a reporter, but firstly as an immigrant in Toronto. Often those disembarking from third-class water passage could make it little farther on their few coins and their inability to talk their way into the city. There was always work to be had with vessels and barges tugging in and out, and all manner of trade, legitimate and less-than-legal. It was also cheapest to hole out near the water, where rats scurried and makeshift tin roofs did little to stave off the elements.