“Relativity,” Ling corrected quickly under her breath.
“… that I completely lost track of the time.”
“Funny,” Ling whispered.
“What?” Henry said.
“Lost track of…” Ling shook her head. “Never mind.”
“Please accept my humblest apology, Mrs. Chan. I can assure you that I have been looking after Ling as if she were my very own sister.” Henry kept such a straight face that he doubted Theta’s acting skills could match his.
Ling’s mother softened. “Well. ’Ta, then, for bringing Ling home safely, Henry. Could we fix you a plate before you’re set on leaving us?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. I have to get to the Foll—to Mass,” Henry said. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ling’s mouth hanging open.
But Ling’s mother was smiling. “I can’t thank you enough, Henry. You’re a good soul. Why, you must come along on our outing tomorrow to see Jake Marlowe break ground for his new fair.”
“How I wish I could, but I—”
“I won’t be taking no for an answer,” Ling’s mother said, hands at her waist. “You deserve a proper thank-you for your kindness today. We’ll see you here at noon.” And with that, she went back to work.
“So very early,” Henry whimpered quietly.
Ling showed Henry out. “Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome. Mothers love me.”
“I meant for today. Earlier.”
“Oh. Well. That’s what friends do. From now on, no more secrets. For either of us.”
“No more secrets,” Ling agreed.
“I’m going to see if I can speak with Miss Proctor. See you tonight, the usual place?”
Ling nodded. “And tomorrow, too.”
“Yes. At noon,” Henry said, grimacing. He glanced over Ling’s head at Mrs. Chan, who was bustling about the restaurant like a general inspecting troops. “Your mother is truly terrifying, by the way.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Ling said.
“When Louis arrives, I’m bringing him straight here for dumplings. He’ll love them,” Henry said. “And I can’t wait to get my lucky hat back from you. Louis gave it to me the first night we met. Took it right off his head and plopped it on mine. If you like, I’ll ask him to bring two more from New Orleans, one for you and one for Wai-Mae. Then we can become the dream world’s first barbershop quartet. ‘Constipation, constipation, constipation, constipationnnn!’” Henry sang out.
“You are the strangest person I’ve ever met.”
“There you go with that sweet talk again.”
Something nagged at Ling, something she felt she should tell Henry. It was just a feeling, though, and she didn’t yet know how to put it into words.
“Ling! Come out of the cold this instant!” Mrs. Chan called, her voice muffled on the other side of the glass.
“Your mother bellows, fair Juliet,” Henry said, bowing with a hammy Shakespearean-actor flourish. “Away with me! Fie! Fie! Ham on Fie!” he said, yanking on his own collar and stumbling backward.
Ling shook her head as she watched him go. “Definitely the strangest person,” she said, and she was surprised at how much she missed Henry already.
When Sam had worked for the circus, he’d managed to walk away with a very nice tuxedo tailored for him by a Russian tattoo artist who also had great skill with a needle and thread. The tuxedo had always managed to elicit attention; Ruth, the Bearded Lady, and Johnny, the Wolf Boy, had both given him an appreciative up-and-down appraisal whenever he’d stepped into the ring wearing “The Tux.” He hoped it might work some magic on Evie tonight.
Just before Sam left the museum for WGI, a note had been delivered to his door: If you want to know more about that part for your radio, come to the shop tonight. Nine o’clock. He knew Evie would be spitting mad that he’d missed her show. Hell, he couldn’t blame her. But his contact was not a fella who gave second chances. He hoped Evie did.
The Winthrop Hotel’s ballroom was wall-to-wall with swells. Sam worried he wouldn’t find Evie in the crush. But all he had to do was follow the sound of laughter and applause. There was Evie, sitting on the back of a stuffed alligator.
“… He asked me to read his wristwatch, and when I did, I saw him in his altogether… one of those nudists. Well, I couldn’t very well say that on the radio.…”
Sam pushed his way to the front, past the crowd of admirers. Evie looked so beautiful in her marabou feather–trimmed midnight-blue dress, a sparkling band of rhinestones resting across her forehead, that for a moment, it squeezed the breath out of him.
“Well, if it isn’t my beloved,” Evie snarled, eyes flashing, and Sam knew that no tuxedo was magical enough to save him from the rough evening to come.
“Hiya, Lamb Chop. Could I borrow you for a minute?”
Evie gave him a sideways look. “Sorry. I was available at nine.”
“I know. I’d love to tell you all about that.” He glanced meaningfully at the others.
“Do carry on. I won’t be a moment, darlings,” Evie said with a bow to the appreciative audience of swells. “You were supposed to meet me at the show, Sam!” Evie hissed to Sam under her breath while keeping her smile toothpaste-ad bright for the party guests who applauded as she and Sam walked through the crowded ballroom. “I’ve spent the last two hours worried that you were bleeding to death in a ditch,” Evie continued. “Now that I know you’re okay, I just want you to be bleeding to death in a ditch.”
“Aww, Lamb Chop, you missed me.”
“That’s what you just heard?”
“What can I say? I’m an optimist.”
“The world is full of dead optimists. Sam, Sam, Sam!” Evie’s head swished like windshield wipers with each utterance of his name. The drink in her hand was nearly gone.
“That’s me. Say, how much of that coffin varnish have you had, Sheba?”
Evie closed one eye and looked up at the hotel’s coffered ceiling, bright with chandeliers, her lips moving as she counted. “This is three. At four, we can play martini bridge.” She giggled.
“Holy smokes,” Sam whistled.
“Wait a minute: Are you waiting for me to get ossified so you can take liberties with me, Sam Lloyd?”
“No. I like my girls fully conscious when I kiss ’em. I’m funny that way,” Sam said. He grabbed her glass and downed the rest of it, eating the olive.
“Hey! What’s the big idea?” Evie protested.
“I’m saving you from yourself.”
“I don’t need any saving,” Evie grumbled. “What I needed was that drink. You didn’t even save me the olive.”
Sam put up his hands in a gesture of apology. “Okay. That’s fair. Abso-tive-ly fair. Let’s say the tables were turned. If I were about to walk off a cliff, what would you do?”
Evie pursed her lips. “Push?”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You would on the way down. So what was so important that you missed the show? And it had better be good, Sam. Appendectomy-scar good.”
“Not here.”
A party guest set his teacup on a side table and turned to applaud the orchestra. Evie swiped the cup, sniffed it, smiled, downed the secret booze in one gulp, and put the empty cup back. Quickly, she motioned Sam away from the scene of the crime and into a room marked PRIVATE. Inside the small office were a fainting couch and a desk with a telephone and a rolling chair. Evie lay back on the couch, propped her feet up, and rubbed her temples.
“Rough night?” Sam asked, perching on the edge of the desk.
“And how. Some fella brought in his wife’s handkerchief. He said he was worried that she was spending too much money shopping, but he was really worried that she was having an affair. He was right, by the way. The handkerchief came from her lover,” Evie said.
“Gee, what’d you tell him?”
“I told him she was spending a little too much money and that perhaps they should go out for dinner a
nd dancing more often.” Evie let out a long exhale. “You wouldn’t believe the awful stuff I find out about people.”
“Why don’t you tell them the truth?” Sam asked.
“The truth doesn’t sell soap. Keep it light and happy and entertaining. Give ’em hope, kid!” Evie said, imitating Mr. Phillips’s booming baritone.
“But that makes you no better than those phony con men on Forty-second Street,” Sam said. “You’re the real McCoy, Sheba. You don’t need to fake it.”
Evie sat up, glaring. “I did not come to this party to hear a lecture from you, Sam Lloyd. You steal people’s wallets. Don’t act like you’re better than I am.”
“Me? Sure, I’m a thief and a con. But not you, kid. Unfortunately, you care. I know you.”
“No, you don’t,” Evie said, lying back again. “You just think you do because you’re my pretend fiancé. But nobody really knows anybody. We’re all just a bunch of Pears soap ads walking around clean and neat, ready to wash away to slivers.”
“What’s real, then?”
“I dunno anymore, Sam. I really don’t. I just… don’t wanna think about it.”
Sam felt the air going out of the evening. “Well, before you get completely blotto, I need your services.”
Evie laughed and applauded slowly. “I should’ve guessed. Well, nothin’ doin’. You didn’t come through for me tonight, so I am under no obligation to help you. And you still haven’t told me what happened!”
“Sorry, doll. Honest, I am. At the last minute, I got a message from my canary.”
“Your what?”
“My—what’d you call him? Creepy man?”
“Oh. Him,” Evie said, blowing a wayward curl off her forehead.
“He almost never gets in touch. I’m the one who puts out the word for him. But he slipped a note under my door telling me to meet him at the radio shop at nine.”
“I hope the shop was at least playing my show,” Evie grumbled. “Well? What’d you find out?”
“That’s the funny thing: He never showed.”
“There’s quite a bit of that going around,” Evie said pointedly.
“When I got there, the place was dark and all locked up. I woulda picked the lock, but if I got pinched, I was afraid it wouldn’t look too good for your fiancé to be a jailbird,” Sam said. “But I don’t like it. Something smells.”
“You just have an overactive imagination, Sam.”
“Doll, when my imagination’s overactive, it usually involves activities polite society doesn’t allow me to talk about. I thought you’d be on my side here.”
Evie softened. “Gee, Sam, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I have to find the truth.” Sam Lloyd did not ask for favors. Whatever he needed, he paid for or took—no strings, no debts. So it took everything he had to offer Evie the file again. “Please?” he asked, the word unfamiliar. “Could you please try one more time?”
The soft pleading of Sam’s tone stirred Evie’s sympathy. “All right, Sam. I’ll see what I can do.” She sat up and patted the seat of the divan. “Here. I won’t bite. Unless you start to sing.”
Sam bounded over and sat beside her. Evie took the file and put everything she had into it, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get a read. She broke away, woozy and angry.
“Thanks anyway, kid,” Sam said, taking the file back.
“I refuse to be beaten!” Evie groused, reaching for it again.
Sam tucked it inside his jacket pocket. “Nah, it’s jake, doll. I’ll… I’ll take you back to the party—”
“Sam!” Evie said, jumping up from the divan and knocking over a tableside bust of a stern-looking Roman general. “Stay!” she said, righting the bust at the last second. “Good boy.”
Sam’s eyebrows shot up.
“Listen, Sam: Do you still have that photograph from Anna Polot… Pala… Anna Anna?”
Sam took out his wallet and fished out the photo he now kept inside its folds. “It’s just a picture of me with my mother.”
“I know. But it’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
Sam grinned. “That’s my girl.”
“I am not your girl,” Evie said, fighting a smile.
At first, the photo was also cold. But Evie wasn’t about to lose again. She concentrated until there was a momentary spark, and then she reached into that spark of memory, teasing it into flame. She saw a woman with brown hair pinned at the back of her neck and dark, full brows and knew at a glance that she was Sam’s mother. In Miriam’s hands was the very photograph Evie held now.
“I see her,” Evie said dreamily.
“You do?” Sam’s voice was so hopeful.
“She’s lovely, Sam. Truly.”
Evie breathed in and out, letting herself go under by degrees, getting more of a picture. The first memory was small and simple: A very young Sam sat beside his mother as she stroked a hand across his hair. There were few things more powerful than a mother’s love, and that’s what Evie felt here: No matter what Miriam Lubovitch had told those men, she loved her son very much. As much as Evie’s mother had loved James, which was infinitely more than she’d ever loved Evie. It wasn’t true that parents didn’t have favorite children. They did, and Evie had not been it. The pain of that memory reached through the booze and squeezed a fist around Evie’s heart, threatening to derail the reading. In defiance, she pushed deeper into the photo’s secret history.
Now she saw a beautiful room with marble floors, heavy crystal chandeliers throwing off prisms of light, and walls hung with expensive-looking portraits of expensive-looking people. There were children in the room. Some sat at tables drawing pictures or answering questions. Some fussed with their collars. One little girl played with her doll.
But where was Sam? Was he here?
And then she saw young Sam seated at a table in a corner, his mother standing just behind his chair, looking nervous. Across from Sam sat Will’s long-dead fiancée, Rotke Wasserman. She drew a card from a deck, hiding its face. “Let’s try one more time. Sam, can you tell what card I’m holding?”
“Um, Five of… Clubs?”
“Why don’t you try again,” Rotke urged.
“King of Hearts?” little Sam lisped from a mouth with a front tooth missing. “Jack of Diamonds!”
Rotke smiled at Sam but shook her head at his mother.
“Am I in trouble?” Sam asked.
“Nyet, bubbeleh,” his mother said, kissing him on the cheek. “Go out and play.”
The memory blurred around the edges, and Evie leaned into it. Children played on the grass on a stretch of perfectly manicured lawn. It was a beautiful spring day, and their joy was infectious. But one child was crying. Evie followed the sound to the girl with the doll.
“What’s the matter, Maria?” Rotke asked, crouching before the child.
The girl began to answer in Italian.
“In English, please.”
“The boat is on fire. It’s sinking,” the little girl cried. And as she did, other children seemed to become agitated as well, as if they had all seen the same dream.
“Rotke! Rotke!” A man ran out of the house and onto the lawn, and Evie’s mind swam. Fair hair. Spectacles. Younger, yes, but it was most definitely Will. Evie was so surprised that she could barely concentrate on what her uncle was saying.
“… Message over the wireless… the Germans have torpedoed the RMS Lusitania. They’ve killed Americans.”
The past buzzed like a staticky radio seeking a signal. And then it landed tenuously on some other bit of history briefly recalled:
“Miriam, the government has asked us to recruit Diviners. Project Buffalo. We need your help.”
Sam’s mother, frightened: “I don’t like the plan.”
“It will be fine. There are precautions.”
“What you want to do—it’s dangerous. It will draw bad spirits.”
“We’re going to win. Come to the Harbor, Miriam. I’m askin
g. They won’t.”
Evie lost her footing in the reading. Images came too fast, like a film sped up—so much memory and emotion she felt sure she’d be lost inside them if she didn’t let go. She collapsed against Sam as she took her hands from the photograph. He put his arms around her, holding her close. “I got you. It’s okay.”
Evie rested her cheek against his warm chest and listened to the rhythmic comfort of Sam’s heartbeat as she waited for the dizziness and trembling to subside. She liked the weight of his chin atop her head and the smell of shaving cream clinging to his neck. She should sit up, she knew, but she didn’t want to.
“Did you get anything, doll?”
Should she tell Sam she’d seen Will? What would he do if he found out that Will knew his mother and had been lying all this time?
“You were at a table, and Rotke was asking if you could guess at the cards in her hand. But you couldn’t. I don’t understand: Why was she testing you?”
“Beats me, Sheba. I don’t remember any of this stuff,” Sam said, frowning. He rubbed at his forehead, as if that motion could shake loose the memories. “How come I can’t remember?”
“Your mother loved you so much, Sam,” Evie said, and she felt Sam’s arm tighten around her. “Objects don’t lie. I could tell.”
“Thanks,” Sam muttered. “Anything else?”
“I-I couldn’t see everything,” Evie lied. “But someone was asking your mother to help the government with Project Buffalo in some way. But she thought what they wanted was too dangerous, that it would draw bad spirits, whatever that means. And I heard something about ‘Come to the Harbor.’ Do you know what that means?”
Sam shook his head. “Plenty of harbors around, though.”
“Do you know anything about where this picture was taken?” Evie asked.
Sam stared at the photograph. He shook his head. “I don’t recognize it. Why?”
“I couldn’t tell precisely, but it looked a bit like a castle.”
“A castle castle?”