Fritz had made himself a comfortable nest in a vacant lot down the street from The Julia. From this vantage point, he could see the rooming house’s front door and a three-block stretch of the street. He had a blanket beneath him and another blanket over him, and his hat, cocked low over his eyes, would have hidden his identity from his own mother. A half-empty bottle in a bag sat six inches from his face, and his left hand curled around it like a buzzard’s talon. He was as sober as a judge, but he looked like he was in the process of drinking his life away. The casual observer would think he had come to a place in life where he owned nothing but his hat, his tattered clothes, the two blankets, and the nearly empty bottle of rum. That is, he would have looked like that if the casual observer had paid him a millisecond of attention instead of walking past with averted eyes.
He needed help with this job, but he had none. He couldn’t maintain twenty-four-hour surveillance on his target alone. He had to sleep. He had to work, if only to pay the cost of parking his car nearby, so that he could follow Justine wherever she decided to go. Tonight, he had chosen to forego sleep, because he felt that the affair of Justine Byrne was coming to a close. It had to come to a close. He was a day away from complete collapse, two at the most.
He thought he knew how best to sway her. This was a woman who could be tempted by work that valued her capabilities. She was not meant to be ground down in a thankless job and she would not tolerate such treatment forever. This much had become obvious. He had a real chance of recruiting her and, in so doing, seducing her into so much more. Here was a woman who was worth his time.
Fritz imagined coming out of New Orleans, ready to broker both the secrets of the Carbon Division and the services of a most capable new spy. Those secrets and that spy would save him even if Germany was no more when he finally escaped this country of vermin, because the Japanese would be just as interested in what he had to sell. The proceeds from that sale would buy him an extremely nice retirement, and he didn’t care at all whether it was in Berlin or in Tokyo.
When the time was right, he would tip his hand and ask her to join him. Given her intelligence, he might not need to tip his hand for her to see him for what he was, and this made her dangerous. Very soon, she would either ally herself with Fritz, or she would become his adversary. Living as he did, alone in a country full of adversaries, he needed an ally badly. He was coming to understand that he wanted this particular ally badly.
If he could make her love him, then he would win, because love was weakness. This made his feelings for her dangerous. They made him fear for Justine because he felt certain that powerful forces swirled around her. Powerful forces other than Fritz, that is.
And thus, here he was, lying on the cold, hard ground. It was his mission to make sure that she was safe unless she committed herself against him. A decision like that would render her unsafe indeed.
***
Justine stepped quietly off the fire escape and hesitated in the pool of darkness there. She could turn right and find herself on the street she traveled every day on the bus to work. The Julia faced this street, and its front door opened to it.
Or she could step out of the shadows and move left, toward the less-traveled, shabbier-looking street that hugged The Julia’s back wall. Tonight seemed like a night to do the unexpected. She turned left.
***
Fritz, pretending to sleep, kept his half-closed eyes on The Julia’s front door. Until the moment hours later when he saw Justine hurrying from the streetcar stop, trying to get home in time to dress and catch the bus for work, he would never know that she’d been gone.
***
Justine didn’t dare travel the direct route to Gloria’s house. This would have taken her down St. Charles Avenue, lined with sprawling homes separated from the world by ornate ironwork fences. St. Charles was such a major thoroughfare that she would surely be seen by someone, even in the middle of the night. Instead of taking that risk, she cut a path parallel to its well-traveled lanes that took her through residential neighborhoods where the streets weren’t the best place for a woman at night, alone.
Here, people lay sleeping in their beds, just on the other side of each open window that she passed. From their gardens, the scents of angel’s trumpet and ginger blossoms reached out for Justine, one variety toxic and psychoactive, and the other variety merely delicious. The white flowers of both plants glowed in the moonlight.
She moved from shadow to shadow, trying and failing to keep the leather soles of her penny loafers from tapping on the pavement. At last, she leaned down and removed them, carrying her loafers in one hand and padding barefoot down the sidewalk.
Block after block, she moved in silence, only attracting attention once. Two men who were also keeping to the shadows stepped into the middle of the street to catch her attention. The weird light of a quarter-moon illuminated their foreheads, noses, cheekbones, and chins, leaving the hollows of their faces in darkness.
“Hey, sweetheart. Whatchoo doin’ out so late? You need us to help you find a bed for the night? C’mon, say yes.”
She broke into a run with her very next step. Acorns punched hard into her bare soles. They hurt her, but she ran, and she kept running.
Nothing pursued her but the sound of the men’s voices calling after her. Their slurred words and over-sweet tones said that they were far too drunk to chase her. She ran anyway.
“Hey, baby. Ain’t no need to run so fast. We don’t wanna hurt ya. Maybe just a little squeeze.”
She ran. Over the hard acorns and the jagged pavement and the many-pointed pine cones, she ran.
***
Mudcat gave himself a pat on the back. He had homesteaded the darkest spot on Gloria Mazur’s street, because he had guessed that the coded screen would probably send Justine to her godmother for help in deciphering it.
Though she was keeping her path to the sidewalks, weaving out into the empty roadway only to avoid the light cast by streetlamps, he could see her. He drew deeper into a magnolia tree’s dense shadow.
She had tied her beautiful hair up in a scarf the color of a crow’s wing, but curling tendrils of it had escaped. Even in the low light, her hair glowed like something that burned from within. Her black dress rendered her nearly invisible, except for those tendrils, the pale skin of her face, her hands, her ankles, and her bare feet.
Her shoes dangled from one hand, and she moved like she was tired. Of course, she was tired. She’d worked a long day and danced half the night. And now she’d walked for miles.
This would be the night when she figured out that, together, she and Dr. Gloria Mazur were unstoppable. This could be a problem for Mudcat.
He had told his superiors everything he’d learned about Dr. Mazur at the library, only to find that his organization already knew all about her. They had known all about Justine’s late parents, too. His superiors understood Dr. Mazur’s potential, and they understood her essential weakness. She was too valuable to lose and too unstable to trust. They had been watching her for years, for the entire war, making sure she was hidden from an enemy that would probably give a lot to get its hands on her, if it knew her true value.
When she’d stopped teaching, they had begun working with the bank to ensure that funds were shifted into her account in a constant flow of tiny errors that were always in her favor. She was too good with numbers to fail to notice this subterfuge, but the bank had been told to pay no attention when she reported the discrepancies. They’d also been told to pay no attention to the fact that the man who had co-owned the account with her, since women weren’t allowed to have accounts of their own, was now dead.
When she’d stopped leaving the house, his organization had inserted an agent in a rental house down the street who posed as her delivery boy. He was tasked with making sure no strangers were coming around. He watched her house. He mowed her yard for a quarter of the going rate. He served as an errand boy, returning her change in the bag with each delivery, and each time the groceries were slightly underpriced and the change was slightly excessive. Again, she was too good with numbers to fail to notice, but he routinely walked away when she tried to repay him.
In aggregate, the money that the organization had managed to funnel to Dr. Mazur had kept her solvent, more or less. And that had kept her off the enemy’s payroll. The organization was taking good care of Gloria Mazur because it would be tragic if they had to swoop in and remove her from her everyday life, just to keep her secrets safe.
He watched Justine creep barefoot across Gloria’s lawn and step into an overgrown flower bed. Her arm brushed a tall shrub as she reached down to lift up a heavy object, probably a brick, that was propping up its leaning trunk. A warm breeze carried a cloyingly sweet smell to his nose. She retrieved something lying on the ground and replaced the brick, and now he knew that Gloria Mazur hid her spare house key at the foot of a sweet olive bush.
He watched Justine enter Gloria’s house. After waiting a few moments, he headed down the street in the direction from which she’d come. He had no need to see how long she stayed with Gloria, only that she’d come, which meant that matters were coming to a head. There was no point in following her home. He already knew where she lived.
The most important thing that he’d just learned was where Justine was at this moment in time. Because this also meant that he knew where she wasn’t.