Spurred by the governor’s disbelief and furnished with a sketch map by Vanzetti, Felicani and Ehrmann made the rounds of the waterfront wholesale fish dealers. Finally, at 112 Atlantic Avenue, they found that one of the partners of Corso & Gambino remembered shipping fish to Vanzetti in 1919. The firm had then been Corso & Cannizzo. Ehrmann and Felicani dug away for hours among Corso’s dusty account books until at last they uncovered what they had almost given up hope of finding, an American Express Company receipt showing that on Saturday, December 20, 1919, a forty-pound barrel of eels had been shipped with C.O.D. charges of $21.79 to B. Vanzetti, Plymouth.
The eels must have been delivered either on Monday or Tuesday. Mary Fortini, Vanzetti’s landlady, had testified they arrived “either the twenty-second or the twenty-third, I do not remember exactly.” She said the expressman had brought the barrel at about half-past nine in the morning, when Vanzetti was out, and as she had no money to pay him he had taken it away and come back later. “After one Monday Vanzetti and the express came back” was the awkward way the interpreter translated her explanation. Ehrmann took “after one Monday” to mean “the following day.” Vanzetti would have received his eels on Tuesday, spent Tuesday night cleaning them, and on Wednesday—the morning of the Bridgewater holdup attempt—he would have been busy making his deliveries. Ehrmann thought at last he had found the key to unlock the doors of the state prison. He and Felicani took the yellowed express receipt to Thompson who, in Fuller’s absence, handed it over to the governor’s secretary—and that was the last they heard of it.
Sunday, the last day of July, the heat wave broke in drizzling rain. A crowd of three thousand, divided between sympathizers and the usual Sunday afternoon floaters, attended a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting on the Charles Street Mall of Boston Common. Alfred Baker Lewis, the wealthy pince-nezed perennial Socialist candidate for governor, introduced the speakers: Gardner Jackson, Harry Canter, Mary Donovan, and Professor Guadagni. Canter called for a general strike, and Mary Donovan shouted in a trembling voice that if they executed those two innocent men they could execute her too. The fiery words spluttered out damply in the rain; the crowd remained inert.
Fuller spent the week end at his summer estate at Little Boar’s Head, Rye Beach, New Hampshire. Two days before, his son Alvan, Jr., had to be operated on suddenly for appendicitis, and for a day or so the governor thought he might have to delay his decision. However, just before leaving the city he promised reporters that he would make it known Wednesday evening. The feeling in the corridors of the State House, in State Street, on Newspaper Row, among those in the know was that the governor would end up by granting a new trial. Louis Stark’s dispatch to the New York Times concluded:
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will not die in the chair on the date set. Neither will they be pardoned. Further reprieve pending steps by the Massachusetts Legislature looking to a new trial was indicated as the solution which Governor Fuller will place before the Executive Council when it meets tomorrow night.
Whatever the rumors of a reprieve, there was no sign of it as August began. Imperturbably the clockwork mechanism of the law advanced another notch as, on the night of August 2, Sacco, Vanzetti, and Madeiros were moved to the isolation of the death house. The day before that move, Vanzetti had tried to persuade Sacco to give up his hunger strike, but the other refused, saying there was no use in making himself fat to be killed.
The transfer was made secretly, the guards waiting until ten minutes after lights out before coming to the cells to take the condemned men away. Down the short flight of iron stairs guards and prisoners clattered to the darkness of the outer yard and then diagonally across the inlaid brick to the narrow passage between the north wing extension and the license-plate shop. “In coming, I got a glance to the nighty, starry sky,” Vanzetti wrote. “Hit was so long I did seen it before—and thought it was my last glance to the stars.”
There were only three cells in the blank-walled death house. The white-tiled floors had a black line painted six feet in front of each cell beyond which no visitor might step. Sacco and Vanzetti, locked up there, could not see each other, but they could talk back and forth. Each cell was lit by a lamp outside the bars and contained a cot, a chair, a table, and a toilet. The perspective of the antiseptic room concluded in a small gray door leading to the execution chamber.
Sacco’s reaction to the death house was to pace up and down, his energy undiminished even though he had not eaten for over two weeks. Vanzetti, who again refused food, tried to immerse himself in The Rise of American Civilization. Only Madeiros seemed unaffected by the change. Torpid, outwardly indifferent, he ate enormously but gave scarcely any other sign of life. When Warden Hendry offered to pay his mother’s way to Boston, he said he did not want to see her.