Iron Cast(69)

Wine still sang in her blood, and if she wasn’t careful to focus, the room would start to slip sideways. She kept her eyes on the tense line of Gabriel’s shoulders as they neared the back. She didn’t know why he was so confident that Silas Witcher would see them, but she was relieved that he wasn’t fighting her anymore. It was hard enough trying to bring Ada on board without him brooding over his logical, but ultimately irrelevant, concerns.

Gabriel knocked on the door that led into the back rooms of the saloon. The door cracked open.

“No admittance after ten,” a voice barked.

“It’s five till,” Gabriel replied evenly.

It was actually ten minutes past, but the man on the other side of the door didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, he pushed it open a few more inches and waved at them to come in. Corinne didn’t like how easy it was, because easy never boded well in their business. She glanced back to catch Ada’s eye and could see that she harbored the same disquiet. Corinne knew that if they were going to turn back, now was their last chance. She couldn’t do that, though, no matter what waited on the other side of the door. She followed Gabriel inside.

There was a meeting happening in a room to their left. Men, and some women, sat in rows of chairs, their backs to the door. At the front, pacing in a frenzy, a man was shouting about the greedy pig of capitalism. The energy was palpable, even from the hall.

There were a few other doors along the corridor, but the Witchers’ office was at the very end. Gabriel hesitated for the first time since they had entered the saloon. Corinne slipped past him to knock on the door. A reedy voice answered, and she went in.

Silas Witcher was bent over his desk, scribbling furiously in a journal. He was a slight man with a dark mustache who was rumored to subsist on a diet of bread, water, and books by foreign writers. His brother, George, a retired minister, wasn’t as averse to nourishment, but he spent most of his time out of town, preaching the evils of alcohol. Neither abided the frivolity and excess of the Red Cat or the Cast Iron. Corinne had asked Johnny once how a teetotaler justified ownership of a saloon, and he’d only smiled wryly and said that they had to pay for the sackcloth and ashes somehow. Corinne suspected that the Witchers’ asceticism was only a means to an end. What they really believed in was a new society, a revolutionary class, an equal brotherhood, and other things that Corinne couldn’t remember because she had used the pamphlet they gave her as a fly swatter.

“What are you doing here?” Silas demanded, barely glancing up.

“We just came to talk,” Corinne said. Her voice felt strange, like it was coming from somewhere distant and not her own throat. She was starting to regret those last two glasses of wine.

“Not you,” Silas said, waving his pen in a silencing motion. “Stone. They told me you had blinked out on us.”

Corinne and Ada both stared at Gabriel, who was very deliberately avoiding their eyes.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Well, I did.”

“Which is it?” Silas asked.

“I found work over at the Cast Iron.”

“Ah. Well, that explains your new choice of company.” Silas regarded Ada and Corinne with a critical eye. There had been a special emphasis on the word company.

“What is he talking about, Gabriel?” Corinne asked quietly.

“Gabriel used to be a regular at our weekly meetings,” Silas said, going back to his work. “He’s got some very interesting theories on the integration of socialism that I’ve been begging him for years to publish.”

“I told you, I’m no writer,” Gabriel said.

“You’re a communist?” Ada asked.

“Socialist,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

“Are you sure you’re not a Bolshevik?” Corinne asked.

He looked at her sharply, and she could see a muted panic in his eyes. So she was the only one who knew about his Russian origins. She couldn’t remember why it was so important that she keep it a secret. Her brain was bubbly, and every coherent thought was oscillating out of her reach. Something about his mother.

“A Bolshevik?” Ada echoed.

Even Silas had looked up from his writing.

“Never mind,” Corinne said, unable to pull her eyes from Gabriel’s, even though his face came in and out of focus with the rhythm of her pulse. “I’m drunk, remember?”

Ada’s glare had switched to her, half frustrated, half concerned. Corinne shook her head, hoping to indicate that she was fine, but the movement made her dizzy. She had felt fine outside, in the frigid, open air. In here, where everything was cramped and dark and warm, she was suffocating.

“Johnny is dead,” she said. They hadn’t told Luke Carson that because it made more sense to draw him out and figure out what he already knew, without announcing that his business rival was dead and the Cast Iron had gone dark. The same logic probably applied here, but she wasn’t equipped for that kind of subtlety tonight.

Silas’s pen was scratching on paper again, his head bowed over the page.

“I know,” he said.

“Did you kill him?”

Ada and Gabriel both elbowed Corinne simultaneously, which she thought was a bit excessive. She hadn’t accused Witcher of anything, per se.

“Dervish and Carson built themselves kingdoms on the backs of the working class, and kingdoms always crumble,” Silas said.