Solution: In support of all these comrades, the workers of the world should unite in civil unrest.

Should.

Could.

Might.

No actual plans for revolution that Danny could hear. No specific plotting of the insurrectionary deed.

Just more drinking. More talk that turned into drunken shouts and shattered stools. And it wasn’t just the men shattering stools and shouting that night but the women as well, although it was often hard to tell them apart. The workers revolution had no place for the sexist caste system of the United Capitalist States of America—but most women in the bar were hard-faced and industrial-gray, as sexless in their coarse clothes and coarse accents as the men they called comrades. They were without humor (a common affliction among the Letts) and, worse, politically opposed to it—humor was seen as a sentimental disease, a by-product of romanticism, and romantic notions were just one more opiate the ruling class used to keep its masses from seeing the truth.

“Laugh all you want,” Hetta Losivich said that night. “Laugh so that you look like fools, like hyenas. And the industrialists will laugh at you because they have you exactly where they want you. Impotent. Laughing, but impotent.”

A brawny Estonian named Pyotr Glaviach slapped Danny on the shoulder. “Pampoolats, yes? Tomorrow, yes?”

Danny looked up at him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Glaviach had a beard so unruly it looked as if he’d been interrupted swallowing a raccoon. It shook now as he tilted his head back and roared with laughter. He was one of those rare Letts who laughed, as if to make up for the paucity in the rest of the ranks. It wasn’t a laughter Danny particularly trusted, however, since he’d heard that Pyotr Glaviach had been a charter member of the original Letts, men who’d banded together in 1912 to pitch the first guerrilla skirmishes against Nicholas II. These inaugural Letts had waged a campaign of hit-and-hide against czarist soldiers who’d outnumbered them eighty to one. They lived outdoors during the Russian winter on a diet of half-frozen potatoes and massacred whole villages if they suspected a single Romanov sympathizer lived there.

Pyotr Glaviach said, “We go out tomorrow and we hand out pampoolat. For the workers, yes? You see?”

Danny didn’t see. He shook his head. “Pampoo-what?”

Pyotr Glaviach slapped his hands together impatiently. “Pampoolat, you donkey man. Pampoolat.”

“I don’t—”

“Flyers,” a man behind Danny said. “I think he means flyers.”

Danny turned in his booth. Nathan Bishop stood there, one elbow resting on the top of Danny’s seat back.

“Yes, yes,” Pyotr Glaviach said. “We hand out flyers. We spread the news.”

“Tell him ‘okay,’” Nathan Bishop says. “He loves that word.”

“Okay,” Danny said to Glaviach and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Ho-kay! Ho-kay, meester! You meet me here,” Glaviach said. He gave him a big thumbs-up back. “Eight o’clock.”

Danny sighed. “I’ll be here.”

“We have fun,” Glaviach said and slapped Danny on the back. “Maybe meet pretty women.” He roared again and then stumbled away.