Chapter 18: Only One Word

I stood on the platform in the roar and knew I had lost the room.

Three hundred men were shouting my own voice back at me.

"That's cut!" I yelled. "Play the whole thing!"

"It's all I have," Clem said into the microphone, with her hand on her heart.

"I'm sorry, Roz. I didn't want to do this."

"You're not sorry."

"I'm very sorry," she said, and a few men near the front believed her.

The gray-haired foreman climbed onto a chair.

"Here's what the union does!" he shouted. "We hold the vote Friday. Nobody gets the docks tonight."

"Friday's after the note is due," I said.

"Then you'd better find four hundred thousand dollars," he said, and he did not look at me.

The deputies came up the steps and put themselves on either side of me, politely.

"Ma'am, the hall is closing."

"Take your hands off her," Nolan said, from the floor.

"Not worth it," I told him quietly. "Not here."

I walked down the steps and through the crowd, and it parted in silence.

A man spat on the boards near my feet.

Another man I had paid on time for six years turned his face away.

Out in the cold, Nolan caught up to me and took my arm.

"That recording," he said. "Where did she get it?"

"The study. I said *Saturday* to her face, the day before the party."

I lit a cigarette, and my hand was steady.

"She cut my word out of that room and put it in front of other words of mine."

"Other words from where?"

"I don't know yet. She runs the books. She'd know how to find them."

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