Free The Missing Italian Girl by Barbara Pope Page A

dream of doing—hurting other people. It was so unfair! Maura stood up, clenching her fists and her teeth.
    She paced as useless questions drove her back and forth in front of the bed. Who’d want to kill Pyotr? And why? Pyotr had always warned them about the agents provocateurs , policemen in disguise, who would say and do terrible things so they could blame and persecute the anarchists. Is that what happened? Or, Maura paused, had someone seen them with Barbereau? Someone who wanted to take revenge. Like the man on the pier, the one Pyotr claimed was a friend. Maura glanced at Angela. The one who had made her sister recoil. Who was he?
    If Angela hadn’t been so inert, staring, one arm in her lap, the other on the table, Maura would have asked her to tell everything she knew about him right then and there. Instead, she continued to pace until she saw Angela’s fingers play lightly over Pyotr’s shirt. As if her touch would bring him back to life. When nothing was going to bring him back. He’d never be whole again. Maura grabbed the shirt and smothered her face in it, breathing the last traces of the boy she had loved. She ignored Angela’s shocked stare as she thrust the shirt back to her. Then Maura dropped into the rickety chair across the table from her sister. They sat there, silent, until it grew so dark they could barely see each other.
    Finally, Angela got up and hugged Maura, telling her they needed to get some sleep. They spent the still, humid night on the Russians’ bed, holding each other and crying.

7
    T HE MORNING THE BOMB WENT off in the Goutte-d’Or district, Bernard Martin was a kilometer away, defending a mason before the industrial council. The mason, Jacques Leroux, sat uncomfortably in a cane-backed chair, pleading his case. His arm was in a dirty, ragged sling, and his face was swollen and discolored. He had taken a terrible fall. Still, without Martin, the council board most likely would have judged him to be negligent in his work habits and made him pay for the builder’s broken ladder, the bricks which came crashing down upon him, and the time lost finding a substitute. The odds were clearly against men like Leroux when five of the seven mediators sitting behind the great table were industrialists, wearing suits and frock coats, and only two, more humbly attired, had ever worked with their own hands.
    As Martin made his arguments, calling the builder’s claims for compensation outrageous, citing the latest laws, and eliciting civil, logical testimony from his defendant, he grew more and more confident. He was changing the odds in favor of the working man, if only because he was “Maître Martin,” a real lawyer, a fact that clearly impressed the board. Elation filled him as he waited for the verdict. Martin was doing the job the men at the Labor Exchange had hired him to do, wringing every bit of justice he could from a legal system stacked against them. When the council decided in favor of Leroux, it was almost an anti-climax.
    Five minutes later, after handshakes all around, Leroux limped beside Martin as they walked out of the council building. When they got a block away, Martin felt free to say some of the things he could not say in front of the businessmen, for fear of alienating them.
    “If we work together, elect the right politicians, there will come a time,” he promised, “when the builders will have to pay you and other injured workers compensation, instead of covering their faults by blaming the men they exploit for everything that goes wrong. Someday there will be real justice for all.”
    Leroux bowed his head, not answering.
    “You’ll be all right for awhile?” Martin asked, fearing that he had been insensitive to Leroux’s situation. He was still so new at this. “The mutual funds will get you through, I hope. Thank God for the union, no?”
    Leroux nodded, then mumbled, “I don’t vote, sir. I wait for the day when the workers will run everything themselves