Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray
Evie mimed a phone receiver at her ear. “Yes, sir, I’d like to report trouble with this Steinway. I’m afraid the sound is a bit… fuzzy.” And they collapsed into one another, laughing.
“Come on. Let’s grab some cherry phosphates and a chipped beef sandwich at Schrafft’s—my treat!” Theta insisted, and no one argued otherwise.
Theta spotted a small bookshop. “Wait! Hold on a minute.” She disappeared into the shop and came out a few minutes later cradling a paper-wrapped bundle.
“What’s that?” Ling asked.
Theta peeled back a corner of the brown paper and showed them the leather-bound copy of Leaves of Grass. “Walt Whitman,” she said. “For Memphis.”
When Theta returned to the Bennington, she stopped and blew a kiss to the portrait of Mr. Bennington. “Thanks, Mr. B. You really came through today,” she said. Upstairs in her kitchen, Theta lit the stove, letting the flame catch on the corner of the first note. She watched it burn. Then she did the same with the other card until the threats were nothing but smoke. If she didn’t have them, they didn’t exist. There was a coating of smudgy soot on her fingertips. Theta went into the bathroom to wash it off. She faced her reflection in the mirror.
“I am Theta Knight,” she said.
And watched her past swirl down the drain.
ALL THE WAY
By Friday, Sam had delivered a small movie camera as promised. “It’s a Filmo by Bell and Howell. Like the little brother to the cameras they use for motion pictures. All you gotta do is pop the film in, thread it into the sprockets, close it up, wind this key here on the side, and you’re in business. I could only get you one roll of film, though.”
“It’s more than enough! Oh, Sam, you’re swell!” Mabel threw her arms around his neck and squeezed.
“Shucks. What gives? You planning to be the next Chaplin?”
Mabel gave a Cheshire cat smile. “Sorry. It’s top secret information. Oh, and, Sam? Please don’t tell Evie about this.”
“Now you’ve really got my curiosity up,” Sam said. But he mimed locking his lips with a key. “Good luck, Mabel.”
Luis knew a friend with a truck, and now the Secret Six were crowded into it on the way to Marlowe’s mine in New Jersey. As they drove out of the city, they passed plenty of billboards advertising the good life: “Wilson Brothers Suits for the Man on the Way Up.” “I’m a Lucky Strike Girl!” “Marlowe Industries: The Good Life Is the American Life.”
“That’s what they do, you know,” Luis said over the wind and the hum of the engine. “They want you to believe you must have all of it. Otherwise, you’re not keeping up with the Joneses.”
“And all of it built on the backs of labor!” Aron shouted above the din.
Mabel smiled and patted the camera. “Let’s see if we can change that.”
Eventually, the billboards and congestion gave way to farmland, a filling station here and there, and even a log cabin tucked into the hills as if modernity were just a passing phase it hoped to ride out. Mabel could hear the mine before she saw it: The gunfire retort of the drills and the rumble of a mine train carrying its load on the tracks were loud even from this distance. As the truck rounded a corner, the mine at last came into view. Three smokestacks belched sooty black plumes into the blue sky. Rocks chugged along on a conveyor belt. Behind it lay a group of modest shotgun-style houses, a school for the workers’ children, and a company store. Mabel knew from her parents that the miners were paid in company scrip, which would buy them goods only at the company store, where the prices were often high. It was a vicious cycle that made it nearly impossible for the workers to ever get ahead.
In front of the mine itself was a gate that was patrolled by armed guards.
About a hundred feet from the mine across a muddy field lay the tent city where the striking workers lived. Some of the wives cooked over meager fires while trying to corral their children. Mabel could only imagine how hard it was.
“There are the machine guns,” Luis said, nodding toward the trucks with Gatling guns mounted on the back.
“And those look like militiamen,” Gloria said, pointing through the dusty windshield at a group of men drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, their rifles slung across their shoulders.
They parked the truck in the tent city. Arthur looked around. “Let’s film the tents to show the conditions here.”
Mabel noticed a woman huddling in the cold with her children. “That’s what you should film, if you really want to arouse sympathy.”
Luis spoke with the mothers and returned with their blessing. Mabel experimented with the camera until the mechanics were second nature to her. Then she peered through the lens, adjusting until one mother’s worried face came into focus, the camera capturing the desperation and worry in her eyes. Mabel had observed people most of her life. She’d learned to be invisible. And right now, that was an advantage. She was the ghost behind the all-seeing camera, shaping pictures into a story. That part was surprisingly instinctual.
Despite the conditions in the camp, the children ran around, playing with sticks and a doll they shared, and Mabel marveled at how resilient they were. She made sure to show them. Surely, people had to feel for the hungry children. But there was something more. Something ephemeral she hoped to catch. She raised the camera again, and this time, she captured the workers coming over the land in a collective joyful spirit—men hoisting children on their shoulders, women in their aprons marching side by side, sons standing with their fathers, girls Mabel’s age holding hands and singing a labor song of solidarity. She wished the camera could record the sound of their singing, but at least it captured their pride, their hope. Her camera found one young girl of perhaps nine or ten. The girl’s hair gleamed in the sunlight. Her eyes were bright. Mabel kept the camera on the child’s smiling face. This, Mabel’s gut told her, was what the country needed to see—a future of possibility shining out from a new, young American. Hope. Wasn’t that American?
Wasn’t that America?
At last, Mabel lowered the camera. Her arms were exhausted, but she’d never been more certain of her purpose. Across the field, a new crew of scabs reported for work. Aron spat into the field. “Traitors.”
“They’re afraid,” Mabel said. “They’re worried they won’t be able to feed their children, that they’ll be deported. You can’t blame them for being afraid. Come on. Let’s do some good.”
Mabel and the rest of the Six moved among the workers. With each tin of beans or blanket they handed out, they heard the miners’ stories.
“At night, the men with guns drive circles around the camp. They fire rifles into the sky to frighten us. It makes the children cry,” a man with a thick Polish accent said. “Inside our tents, we dig tunnels to hide our wives and children in case.”
“In case?” Arthur said.
“In case they decide to no longer shoot at only the sky.”
“Sometimes, they give us tests,” the man’s son said. He looked to be about Mabel’s age.
“What sorts of tests?” Mabel asked.
“There is a doctor, thin, with glasses. We call him Dr. Scarecrow. No one likes him. He asks us about gifts—can we read cards or see into the future, do we have the healing gift?”
Mabel immediately thought of Maria Provenza’s story, but before she could follow up with more questions, everyone’s attention was drawn to the sight of a beautiful Stutz Bearcat bobbling over the rutted road, followed by a small fleet of other, less expensive cars.
“Well, I’ll be. It’s the great man himself,” Arthur said, yanking his cap down tight on his head. “It’s Marlowe.”
Everyone crowded to the limit of the camp line to watch as America’s prince stepped out of his luxurious automobile and shook hands with the guards and militiamen. Several reporters filed out of the other cars. Marlowe had cider doughnuts brought out to them, which the reporters dug into heartily.
“That snake!” Mabel grumbled. “He’s buying them!”
Marlowe posed for pictures with the smiling guards. “Apparently, some of my miners don’t like the idea of an honest day’s work for honest pay,” Marlowe announced with a paternal shake of his bright head. “I pay a fair wage for fair work. Ask anybody. Then these union rabble-rousers come in and upend things. Why, they’re holding American industry hostage, like a bunch of thugs and bullies! By golly, I say, if you come here looking for a better life and the opportunities this great country offers, you have to work for it the American way, and the American way is not union. But as you boys can see, there are always people ready to work.”
The newsboys ate Marlowe’s doughnuts and took down his every word. Not one of them bothered to talk to the workers themselves.
“He’s treating this like some nuisance he wants to scrape off his shoe when there are kids with hungry bellies right here!” Mabel said, furious.
She hopped up onto a tree stump. Her voice soared on the March wind. “Do you remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire? Do you remember the bodies of those girls lying on Greene Street?” Beside Mabel, the miners removed their caps. The mothers held their children tight. “Those girls came here looking for a better way of life, too. They had families. They were loved. They had dreams, too! But the men who ran the factory didn’t think of them that way. They thought those girls would try to steal scraps of cloth from them. Those men cared more about their profits than they did about the workers making them rich. So they locked them inside for twelve hours a day. When the fire broke out, those poor girls were trapped with no way out. Many jumped to their deaths. The others screamed as they burned. And what happened to the owners, to the men who had sealed their fate?” Mabel paused. She had the reporters’ attention now. “Nothing!”
A clamor went up among the workers. They were cheering Mabel on.
“Is that the American way? It would be wonderful if we could depend upon the kindness and fairness of men, Mr. Marlowe, but we can’t. Without unions, there is no protection.” Mabel raised her fist high in the air and shouted, “Union!”
The workers answered in kind. Shouts of “Union!” echoed across the muddy New Jersey field, drowning out Marlowe altogether.
“Who is that? Find out,” Jake Marlowe asked the mine foreman.
The word went ’round and came back: “That’s Mabel Rose, sir. Virginia Rose’s daughter.”
“I think you might’ve gotten some of your mother’s spirit after all, Mabel,” Luis said later as they shared a loaf of bread he’d brought. They each took a piece and passed the loaf around to others in the tent camp.
“Yeah, you’re a chip off the old block,” Gloria said.
“No, she’s not,” Arthur said. “Mabel’s even braver than her mother—smarter, too. The newsreel was a swell idea. You’ll pardon me, but Mabel’s parents are the old guard. We are the new. The future. This is ours.”
Ours. Mabel liked the sound of that. She liked that Arthur believed in her so strongly.
“Do you think we can win?” Mabel asked.
“We’re certainly gonna try, Mabel Rose,” Arthur said, and she loved the way he said her name, like a mantra. With the sun behind him, he looked like a bold new American hero, someone who would shape the future. Arthur wiped his hands on his trouser legs and pulled Mabel to her feet. His hands were warm and strong like hers, and she liked the feel of them. “Let’s find somebody to print that newsreel and get it out there for people to see.”
A woman who’d been standing nearby beckoned Mabel. The woman spoke little English, so she relied on her nephew to relay the message. He listened, nodding.
“What is it?” Mabel asked.
“My aunt Ekadie says that bad is coming,”
“Fortune-tellers again,” Aron scoffed. “Bad is coming for Marlowe once the people see this newsreel.”
“Go on,” Mabel said, shooing Aron toward the truck. “I’ll be there in just a minute.”
The woman spoke to her nephew with rising urgency. Worry was etched into her face.
“It is your aura,” he translated. “She says she can see it all around you, the danger. The ghosts are warning her. There is betrayal. Fire. Death.”
Hadn’t Maria Provenza said much the same?
“What does she mean? What sort of betrayal?”
The young man spoke with his aunt once more. He shook his head. “She doesn’t know. But she says you must be careful.”
Gloria honked the horn. The others were in the truck waving to her, impatient, so Mabel thanked both the woman and her nephew and tried to shake off the warning.
“We’ve only got one shot at this,” Luis said, handing over the canister with the edited newsreel inside. “The projectionist is sympathetic. I paid him a few bucks to take a walk tonight during the premiere of this new Fritz Lang picture, Metropolis.”
“We’ll sneak in and put on the newsreel before the picture starts,” Aron said.
Through the square of a window, Mabel could watch the well-heeled audience flow in and take their seats while an organist played a boisterous tune on the theater’s Mighty Wurlitzer. Mabel’s stomach was all butterflies as the lights dimmed, the tuxedo-clad manager announced the picture, and the gilt-edged, red velvet curtains parted to the audience’s excited applause.
“Here we go,” Luis said. He set the newsreel in motion and left their calling card—THE SECRET SIX—next to the projector so that everyone would know. Then they ran quickly to the upper balcony to watch from behind the safety of the dark.
A title card appeared: THE FUTURE OF AMERICA? NO FUTURE FOR JAKE MARLOWE’S STRIKING MINERS! The newsreel’s first images spooled across the screen: The hungry children. The worried mothers. The militia men driving around in their trucks with their guns. A second title card read: UNION! It was followed by the long shot Mabel had gotten of the workers coming across the field, arms linked in solidarity, that then became the close-ups of those shining eyes in hopeful faces. That scene made her heart swell more than anything she’d ever seen in a Hollywood picture. She’d shot that footage herself. She was making a difference.
The audience grew restless—“What’s going on here? Is this part of the picture? Is it a joke? Start the picture!” Some booed, but there were others who cheered when the words A FAIR AMERICA FOR ALL! appeared on-screen. “Hear! Hear!” they called, applauding, and Mabel thought it might be the best sound she’d ever heard.
Down below, the manager hurried up the aisle, scowling up at the projection booth.
“That’s our cue. Time to go,” Arthur said, snugging his cap down low on his head, and they slunk down the stairs and through the front doors, disappearing into the crowds of Forty-second Street. Mabel looked up at the night sky, wanting to memorize every star. It didn’t matter that the newsreel was most likely being destroyed now. They’d done it. They’d made their mark.
But the following morning, only two newspapers carried a mention of the movie premiere’s disruption-by-newsreel, and it was hardly complimentary.
“‘Anarchist Thugs the Secret Six Take Over Movie Palace with Seditious Propaganda Newsreel,’” Gloria read aloud to the group as they huddled around a table at Chumley’s, a speakeasy. “‘We will keep these lying, outside agitators from disrupting our American way of life, promises mayor.’” She slapped the paper down on the table. “They’re calling us thugs when those militiamen are shooting up the camp? The very nerve!”
“But people saw it,” Mabel reminded them. “Once they’ve seen the truth, it’s harder to ignore. Small acts of resistance matter!” She found herself looking to Arthur, who stared back at her as if he were just seeing her for the first time, as if she were the only girl in the world. The blush burned all the way to Mabel’s toes.
A shaken Luis arrived late. “Management heard about the newsreel,” he said. “They had the militiamen tear up the camp. They beat some of the miners pretty badly. And they’ve threatened worse.”
Mabel’s misery compounded. Hadn’t the newsreel been her idea? Th
“It was still a good idea,” Arthur said, trying to comfort her as the two of them sat in a basement Romanian tavern on Christopher Street, a plate of untouched cabbage rolls between them.
“It was a lousy idea. It didn’t help the miners at all. It just made things worse for them,” Mabel said. How naive she’d been to think that people would be swayed by ideas of right and wrong, by images of hardworking miners and their families trying to survive against the machinery of business. “We’re losing this fight. Jake Marlowe is so powerful. How do you fight back against that kind of power? We’re only five rebels and some striking workers.”
“Today. By tomorrow, who knows how many of us there’ll be?”
“We couldn’t even get people on our side when they could see the conditions for themselves! If they could deny that, then…” Mabel trailed off, her fists clenched on the scarred wooden table.
Arthur lifted her chin with his fingers. As their eyes met, Mabel’s stomach did its flip-flop. How had she not noticed that handsome square jaw before? “Don’t give up hope, Mabel Rose. You anchor me. If you lose hope, well, I might, too.”
A new hope did perch inside Mabel, but it had nothing to do with unions and workers.
By the time Mabel returned home, it was getting late, the lights in the windows of Manhattan blinking on, millions of glowing eyes in the jagged beast of the city. She’d promised Arthur she’d get a good night’s sleep, and the next day, they’d start planning a new resistance.
“Tomorrow,” he’d said, and he made it sound like a battle cry and a love song at the same time.
“Tomorrow,” Mabel had echoed.
When Mabel opened the door to her apartment, her parents were seated on the sofa. They looked worried.
“What is it? Did someone die? Is it Aunt Ruth?”