“Pos-i-tute-ly!” Evie said, raising her glass. “To the Bennington and its ghosts!”
“To us!” Mabel added. They clinked their glasses to the future.
Evie and Mabel spent the afternoon catching up, and by the time Evie returned to Uncle Will’s apartment it was nearly seven, and Will and Jericho had returned. The apartment was larger than she remembered, and surprisingly homey for a bachelor flat. A grand bay window looked out onto the leafy glory of Central Park. A settee and two chairs flanked a large radio cabinet, and Evie breathed a sigh of relief. There was a tidy kitchenette, which looked as if it rarely saw use. The bathroom boasted a tub perfect for soaking, but devoid of even the simplest luxuries. She’d soon fix that. Three bedrooms and a small office completed the suite. Jericho showed her to a narrow room with a bed, a desk, and a chifforobe. The bed squeaked, but it was comfortable.
“That goes to the roof,” Jericho said, pointing to a fire escape outside her window. “You can see most of the city from up there.”
“Oh,” Evie managed to reply. “Swell.” She intended to do more than watch the city from the roof. She would be in the thick of it. Her trunk had arrived, and she unpacked, filling the empty drawers and wardrobe with her painted stockings, hats, gloves, dresses, and coats. Her long strands of pearls she draped from the posts of her bed. The one item she did not put away was her coin pendant from James. When she’d finished, Evie sat with Jericho and Uncle Will in the parlor as the men finished a supper of cold sandwiches in wax paper bought from the delicatessen on the corner.
“How did you come to be in the employ of my uncle?” Evie asked Jericho with theatrical seriousness. Jericho looked to Uncle Will, whose mouth was full. Neither said a word. “Well. It’s a regular mystery, I guess,” Evie went on. “Where’s Agatha Christie when you need her? I’ll just have to make up stories about you. Let’s see… you, Jericho, are a duke who has forfeited his duchy—funny word, duchy—and Unc is hiding you from hostile forces in your native country who would have your head.”
“Your uncle was my legal guardian until I turned eighteen this year. Now I’m working for him, as his assistant curator.”
The men continued eating their sandwiches, leaving Evie’s curiosity unsatisfied. “Okay. I’ll bite. How did Unc—”
“Must you call me that?”
Evie considered it. “Yes. I believe I must. How did Unc become your guardian?”
“Jericho was an orphan in the Children’s Hospital.”
“Gee, I’m sorry. But how—”
“I believe the question has been answered,” Uncle Will said. “If Jericho wishes to tell you more, he will on his own terms and in his own time.”
Evie wanted to say something snappy back, but she was a guest here, so she changed the subject. “Is the museum always that empty?”
“What do you mean?” Uncle Will asked.
“Empty, as in devoid of human beings.”
“It’s a little slow just now.”
“Slow? It’s a morgue! You need bodies in there, or you’re going to go under. What we need is some advertising.”
Will looked at Evie funny. “Advertising?”
“Yes. You’ve heard of it, haven’t you? Swell modern invention. It lets people know about something they need. Soap, lipstick, radios—or your museum, for instance. We could start with a catchy slogan, like, ‘The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult—we’ve got the spirit!’ ”
“Things are fine as they are,” Will said, as if that settled the matter.
Evie whistled low. “Not from what I saw. Is it true the city’s trying to take it for back taxes?”
Will squinted over the top of his slipping spectacles. “Who told you that?”
“The cabbie. He also said you were a conscie, and probably a Bolshevik. Not that it matters to me. It’s just that I was thinking I could help you spruce the place up. Get some bodies in there. Make a mint.”
Jericho glanced from Will to Evie and back again. He cleared his throat. “Mind if I turn on the radio?”
“Please,” Will answered.
The announcer’s voice burbled over the wires: “And now, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, playing ‘Wang Wang Blues.’ ” The orchestra launched into a swinging tune, and Evie hummed along.
CITY OF DREAMS
The girl was exhausted and angry. For seventy-eight straight hours, she and her beau, Jacek, had loped through the dance marathon with hopes of winning the big prize, but Jacek had fallen asleep at last, nearly toppling her. The emcee had tapped them on the shoulder, signaling the end of the contest, and with it their dreams.
“Why’d ya have to go and fall asleep, you big potato!” She punched him in the arm as they left the contest and he staggered, barely able to stay awake.
“Me? I held you up four different times. And you kept stepping on my feet with those boats o’ yours.”
“Boats!” Tears stung at her eyes. She swung at him and stumbled, exhausted by the effort.
“Come on, Ruta. Don’t be that way. Let’s go home.”
“I ain’t going nowhere with you. You’re a bum.”
“You don’t mean that. Here. Sit with me on this step. We can catch the train in the morning.”
The exhaustion she’d fought for so long finally caught up with her. “I ain’t goin’ back like this, with everybody laughing at us like I ain’t nothin’ special and never will be!” she half sobbed. But Jacek didn’t hear. He’d already fallen asleep on the stoop of a flophouse. “You can live there for all I care!” she shouted.
The tracks of the Third Avenue El formed a cage over Ruta’s head as she walked south on the Bowery looking for an El entrance where there weren’t bums lying on the rickety stairs, just waiting. With each exhausted step, she felt the bitter disappointment of returning empty-handed to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where her family lived in a two-room apartment in a crumbling building on a street where nearly everyone spoke Polish and the old men smoked cigarettes in front of store windows draped with fat strands of kielbasa. It was a world away from the bright lights of Manhattan. She looked uptown, toward the distant, hazy glow of Park Avenue, where the rich people lived. She just wanted her piece of it. None of this answering the telephone switchboard at a second-rate law office every day, making barely enough to go to the pictures. Ruta was only nineteen years old, and what she knew most was want—a constant longing for the good life she saw all around her.
Ruta Badowski. Ruta. She hated that name. It was so Polish, brought over by her parents, but she’d been born here, in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. She’d change her name to something more American, like Ruthie or Ruby. Ruby was good. Ruby… Bates. Tomorrow, Ruta Badowski would quit her job at the switchboard and Ruby Bates would take the bus to Mr. Ziegfeld’s theater and audition to be a chorus girl. One day, her name would be in lights, and Jacek and the rest could watch her from the cheap seats and go chase themselves.
“Good evening.”
Ruta gasped; the voice startled her. She squinted in the gloom. “Who’s there? You better get lost. My brother’s a cop.”
“I’ve always had a great appreciation for the law.” The stranger stepped from the shadows.
Her eyes must’ve been playing tricks on her, because the man seemed almost like a ghost in the light. His clothes were funny—hopelessly out of date: a tweed suit even though it was warm, a vest and suit jacket, and a bowler hat. He carried a walking stick with the silver head of a wolf at the top. The wolf’s face was set in a snarl and its eyes were red like rubies. Ruby—ha! That gave her a small shudder, though she couldn’t say why. It occurred to her that she wasn’t in a safe place. These dance marathons were usually held in bad neighborhoods, where they wouldn’t draw too much attention from the city.
“This is a dreadful place for a young lady to be walking alone,” the stranger said, as if he’d read her thoughts. He offered his arm. “Might I be of assistance?”
Ruby Bates might be on her way to being a
glamorous star, but Ruta Badowski had grown up on the streets. “Thanks all the same, mister, but I don’t need help,” she said crisply. When she turned to go, her ankle gave way, and she winced in pain.
The stranger’s voice was deep and soothing. “My sister and I run an establishment nearby, a grand boardinghouse with a kitchen. Perhaps you’d care to wait there? We’ve a telephone if you wish to call your family. My sister, Bryda, has likely made paczki and coffee.”
“Paczki?” Ruta repeated. “You’re Polish?”
The stranger smiled. “I guess we’re all just dreamers trying to find our way in this extraordinary country, aren’t we, Miss…?”
“Ruta—Ruby. Ruby Bates.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Bates. My name is Mr. Hobbes.” He tipped his hat. “But my friends call me John.”
“Thanks, Mr. Hobbes,” Ruta answered. She swooned slightly from exhaustion.
“I have smelling salts, which might aid you now.” The man doused his handkerchief and held it out for her. Ruta inhaled. The scent was pungent and made her nose burn a little. But she did feel peppier. The stranger offered his arm again, and this time she took it. From the outside, he seemed a big man, but his arm was thin as a matchstick beneath his heavy coat. Something about that arm made Ruta cold inside, and she withdrew her own quickly.
“I’m good now. Them salts helped. I’ll take you up on that cuppa Joe, though.”
He gave her a courtly little bow. “As you wish.”
They walked, the stranger’s silver-tipped stick thudding a hollow rhythm against the cobblestones. He hummed a tune she didn’t recognize.
“What’s that song? I ain’t heard it on the radio before.”
“No. I expect you haven’t,” the stranger answered.
With his left arm, he gestured to the broken-down Bowery, with its Christian missions and flophouses, fleabag hotels and tattoo parlors, restaurant-supply stores and rinky-dink manufacturers.
“ ‘Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.’ ”
He pointed to where a couple of drunks slept on the stoop of a flophouse. “Terrible. Someone should clean up this sort of riffraff, turn them back at the borders. They’re not like you and me, Miss Bates. Clean. Good citizens. People with ambitions. Contributors to this shining city on the hill.”
Ruta hadn’t ever thought about it before, but she found herself nodding. She looked at those men with a new disgust. They were different from her family. Foreign.
“Not our kind.” The stranger shook his head. “Once upon a time, the Bowery was home to the most stupendous restaurants and theaters. The Bowery Theatre—that great American theater, which was a sock in the eye to the elitist European theaters. The great thespian J. B. Booth, father of John Wilkes Booth, trod its boards. Are you a patron of the arts, Miss Bates?”
“Yeah. I mean, yes. I am. I’m an actress.” For some reason, Ruta felt a little giddy. The streets had a pretty glow to them.
“But of course! Pretty girl such as you. There’s something quite special about you, isn’t there, Miss Bates? I can tell that you have a very important destiny to fulfill, indeed. ‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet and decked with gold and precious stones….’ ”
The stranger smiled. In spite of the late hour, the strangeness of the circumstances, and the aching in her legs, Ruta smiled, too. The stranger—no, he wasn’t a stranger at all, was he? He was Mr. Hobbes. Such a nice man. Such a smart man—classy, too. Mr. Hobbes thought she was special. He could see what no one else could. It was what her grandmother would call a wróz.ba, an omen. She wanted to cry with gratitude.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“ ‘And upon her forehead was written a name of mystery,’ ” the stranger said, and his face was alight with a strange fire.
“You a preacher or something?”
“I’m sure you must be eager to call your family,” Mr. Hobbes said in answer. “No doubt they’ll be worried?”
Ruta thought of her family’s cramped apartment in Greenpoint and tried not to laugh. Her father would be awake next to her mother, coughing off the damp and the cigarettes and the factory dust in his lungs. Her four brothers and sisters would be crammed together in the next room, snoring. She wouldn’t be missed. And she wasn’t in a hurry to return.
“I don’t wanna wake ’em,” she said, and Mr. Hobbes smiled.
They walked a dizzying number of side streets, until Ruta felt quite lost. The Manhattan Bridge loomed in the distance like the gate to an underworld. A light drizzle fell. “Hey—hey, Mr. Hobbes, is it gonna be much farther?”
“Here we are. Your chariot awaits,” he said, and Ruta saw a broken-down wagon, the old-fashioned kind, drawn by an old nag.
“I thought you said it was nearby.”
“But you’re tired. I’ll drive us the rest of the way.”
Ruta climbed into the buggy, and its gentle swaying rhythm and the clopping of the horse rocked her to sleep. When the old buggy stopped, all she saw was a hulking ruin of an old mansion on a hill surrounded by weedy vacant lots.
Ruta shrank back. “I thought you said you had a boardinghouse. Ain’t nothing here but a wreck.”
“My dear, your eyes play tricks on you. Look again,” Mr. Hobbes whispered low.
He waved his arm, and this time she saw a charming block of attached row houses, warm and homey, and at the end, a fancy mansion like the kind millionaires lived in, people with names like Carnegie and Rockefeller. Why, this Mr. Hobbes fella might even be a millionaire himself! The light drizzle turned to rain. Her velvet beaded shoes with the rhinestone buckles—her prized possession, worth a week’s pay—would be ruined, so she followed the man across the street toward shelter. A black cat crossed her path, startling her, and she laughed nervously. She was getting as bad as her superstitious aunt Pela, who saw evil omens everywhere. The door screamed shut on its hinges behind her and Ruta jumped. The man smiled beneath his heavy mustache, but the smile brought little warmth to his piercing blue eyes. This thought occurred to her fleetingly, but she dismissed it as silly. She was out of the rain, and in a minute she could sit and rest her bone-weary legs.
The place smelled wrong, though. Like damp and rot and something else she couldn’t put her finger on, but it unsettled her stomach. She put a hand to her nose.
“Alas, a poor unfortunate cat was lost in the walls. His aroma, I’m afraid, lingers,” Mr. Hobbes said. “But you’re cold and tired. Come sit. I’ll make a fire.”
Ruta followed the man into another room. Squinting against the dark, she could see the outline of a fireplace. She stumbled and put out a hand to steady herself. The wall felt wet and sticky against her flesh. She yanked her hand away quickly and wiped it on her dress, shuddering.
Mr. Hobbes stepped in front of the cold, blackened fireplace, and in the next moment a roaring fire appeared. Ruta tried to make sense of the sudden flames licking inside the chimney. No, she told herself. He had put in wood and struck a match. Of course he had. She couldn’t remember it, but that’s what must have happened. Boy, that marathon had done a number on her head.
“I-I think I oughta ring my folks after all. They’ll be pretty sore if I don’t.”
“Of course, my dear. I’ll wake my sister. But first, I promised coffee.”
Suddenly, the cup was in her hand.
“Drink. I won’t be a moment.”
With a bow and a tip of his funny hat, the big man disappeared from view. She could hear him humming, though, and she decided she didn’t like that song. It made her skin crawl for some reason. The coffee was strong and hot. It had a bitter aftertaste, but it filled her empty stomach, and Ruta drank it down. Still, it was no match for her exhaustion. Her eyelids fluttered as she watched the fire. Heavier and heavier…
Ruta woke with a snap of her head and a chalky taste on her tongue. The fire was out. How long had she slept? Had she called her family? No. She hadn’t. Where was Mr. Hobbes? What about his sister?
A rat skittered across her shoe. Ruta screamed and leaped up, noticing that she felt oddly watched, as if the room itself were alive. She could swear the walls were breathing. But that was impossible!
“Mr. Hobbes?” she called. “Mr. Hobbes!”
He didn’t answer. Where was he? Where was she? Why had she gone with him? She was smarter than that—running off with a complete stranger. No, he wasn’t a stranger, she reminded herself. He was Mr. Hobbes, kindly Mr. Hobbes who thought she was pretty and special. Mr. Hobbes who might be related to millionaires. Who might be her ticket to the big time.
So why did her breath catch so?
Around her, the house seemed alive with some evil. There. She’d said it. Evil. This word occurred to her just as she passed the lone gas lamp. Its sputtering flame cast doubt on the true nature of the walls. One minute, they were a rich golden hue. The next, Ruta stared at filthy paper peeling away from the plaster in ragged strips. Long streaks smudged across a spot illuminated beneath the lamp. She looked closer and saw dirty fingerprints. No. Not dirt. Blood. A bloody handprint. Four. Only four fingerprints. One was missing.
Ruta’s heart fluttered wildly and her legs jellied. This had been a terrible mistake. She would leave at once. Ruta turned and watched in horror as the last of the illusion crumbled and the house transformed before her eyes into a dark, rotting hole, the rot crawling up the walls to meet her. The smell hit her like a punch, making her gag. And there were rats. Oh, god, how she hated rats. With a little cry, Ruta stumbled forward, as if she could outrun the dark coming to get her. Where was the door? It was nowhere to be found! Almost as if the house were keeping it from her. As if it wanted to keep her here.
“ ‘And upon her forehead was a name written in Mystery: Babylon the Great, the Harlot…’ ”