| |
“Oh, Maggie, the Santa ornament’s perfect!” Jolene said, admiring it in its box. “With the glass ball and the fancy wax ones and the paper chain, it’s going to look like a real Christmas tree!”
It was Sunday afternoon. Jolene and I and three of the other girls were in the little downstairs guest parlor that was currently almost filled by the evergreen tree we’d just set up. The space wasn’t much more than an alcove. By the time the other girls finished changing their clothes after church or Sunday dinner and came down to join us, we’d be bumping elbows every time we moved and laughing.
One of the girls who’d rushed up to change had the room at the top of the stairs. She also owned a radio. The faint sound of Sammy Kaye’s Orchestra trickled down to add to the festive atmosphere. The plate of divinity Mrs. Z had made for us sat on a tea table just outside the arch that formed the entry to the parlor. Jolene already had pronounced it first-rate.
“Hey, I was almost right.” She moved closer to me and lowered her voice. “It was one of the assistant managers, not a bartender, who used to work in that area you were asking about. Rich is his name. Anyway, he tended bar at a place called... Let me think. Fun? No. Revels! That was it, Revels. He said it’s still there, or was six months ago, last time he stopped in.”
Jolene could say a whole paragraph, maybe a whole page, without taking a breath.
“It’s clean, and fairly respectable and Rich said any woman with one or two brains in her head would be okay going there by herself, except maybe late on Saturdays. I told him you had plenty in the brains department. The owner’s named Barney and most of the time he tends bar. Rich said if you tell him you’re a friend of his — Rich’s, I mean — he’d be as friendly as they came.
“The place is around the corner where Sixth would be if it went through there, Rich said. On some brick walkway that used to be a street but isn’t now. One of the waitresses heard us talking and said that’s called a ‘close’, but Rich didn’t think so.”
While Jolene chattered on, I ruminated over the thin sliver of help. By light of day, the things I’d learned from Connelly last night were causing my hopes of finding Gil Tremain alive to dwindle again. Two days ago, the attempt to make off with his daughter had fed logic telling me he was alive. Clearly they’d intended to use her as a lever to force him into giving them the information they wanted. A kid her age couldn’t carry around a string of complicated calculations in her head.
That logic held up through the moment her would-be abductors fled without her. For all I knew, at that point, whoever was holding Tremain would have given up. For all I knew, Tremain had been dead since Friday. At what point did people willing to kill potential witnesses and snatch terrified kids cut their losses? At what point did a prisoner who refused to talk despite beatings and who-knew-what other pressures become a liability?
I’d found a strand of blue wool at The Pompeii. I knew it had come from Tremain’s scarf. I knew he had been there. But I’d been over every inch of that building, and I hadn’t seen him.
He had been there.
He wasn’t there now.
He could have been removed, struggling, the very night I’d managed to thwart the attempt on his daughter. Or taken out unconscious and limp. Or taken out dead.
What was his connection to the man who had owned the lamp shop? To Nico Caras? Should I—
A scream from upstairs splintered the afternoon, a sound with fear and grief and anger all rolled into one. We rushed into the hall as the girl with the radio burst from her room. She seized the post at the top of the stairs and clung to it as if to keep herself upright.
“Come quick!” she screamed. “The announcer — the Japanese have bombed some place of ours! Some navy base in the Pacific!”
Time shattered and reassembled in kaleidoscope bits. Someone thought to fetch Mrs. Z. We were all crowded into one room, a dozen young women and our landlady, pressing together. My hand was on Mrs. Z’s shoulder. She was gripping it to keep it from moving.
In New York, or maybe Washington, some newscaster relayed what the President had said, along with periodic bulletins. Planes attacking. American battleships sinking. Lives lost. Until the papers came out, the station we were listening to, part of NBC Red, was our only available source of news. In between bulletins the network went back to its regular programs while our nerves stretched with the waiting. We’d expected to slug it out with the Germans eventually, but attack had come from a totally different direction, without any declaration of war, and even as the Japanese envoy pretended to negotiate.
“Why hasn’t FDR come on?” Esther’s voice cracked. “Something’s happened to him!”
“No. He’s just busy.” My words came out short because I, too, longed to hear him.
Our President’s voice had coaxed us back up from the very pit of the Depression. It hadn’t solved every problem, but banks had stabilized and factories had reopened. That voice had explained new programs and encouraged us in countless Fireside Chats. It was familiar. More than that, it reassured us.
For more than half an hour we stood or sat on the floor or on the bed and listened to the shards of information that cut in. One said Manilla had also been bombed, which wasn’t true then but was later. Someone scooted the room’s single chair around for Mrs. Z. Someone was sobbing. I heard the recitation of a rosary.
“I need to call home,” Jolene said suddenly. “My brother...” She headed downstairs.
Her brother was a year older. He’d most likely put on a uniform. Her family lived on a farm less than twenty miles from here, but right now, to her, they probably seemed farther away than the distant speck of land whose fate had turned life as we knew it upside down.
Was my brother still alive? Fed up with lack of normal interaction and the corrosive silence that passed as our home life, Ger had run away when he was fourteen and we’d never heard from him. If he was alive, would he go off to war now? Did he have a family himself?
All at once I was gripped by the need to be with the people I was closest to. I slipped from the room, hungry for the faces and sounds of Finn’s.
***
As I drove I could almost pick out which people knew and which didn’t in those I passed. Some came out waving cheery good-byes from Sunday dinner at a relative’s house. Others hurried along with elbows tucked, eager to find refuge.
In Finn’s, voices were muted. Rose set a glass in front of a customer, then dabbed at her eyes when she’d turned away. Finn, passing her, gave her waist a squeeze in place of his usual guff. Seamus left his spot at the bar and came to meet me.
“You doing okay, girl?”
His hand rubbed up and down my shoulder. He hadn’t reassured like that since I was a kid. I nodded.
“You?”
His snowy head bobbed.
“Guess I won’t be putting in for my pension as soon as I’d planned. The younger ones will be wanted to fight, but the city’ll still need coppers. I can manage a couple more years.”
It was the first time all afternoon that I’d teared up. I drew a knuckle through the wetness.
“Let’s get a table, shall we?” he said. “Billy and Kate are like to show up.”
“Or Kate’s already volunteering for something down at the parish hall and dragged Billy with her.” My attempt at humor was shaky, but enough to make him smile.
Connelly stood talking to two of the regulars. His set of uilleann pipes, minus the chanter, still hung around his waist. He must have been practicing in the back room when news about the attack filtered in. Sliding his arm from the bellows strap and unbuckling the rest of the apparatus, he laid the instrument in a battered valise and came to join us.
“So it’s finally come.” He gave my hand a squeeze.
Rose, who knew our habits as well as she knew her own, appeared at the table. She set a fresh Guinness down before Connelly and one before me.
“We’ll be okay,” she said firmly. “We’ve got smart people in Washington. The ones that have argued for keeping our noses out will sing a different tune now.”
She whizzed off as Seamus, having fetched his half-finished pint from the spot he’d vacated, rejoined us. Connelly looked older than he had last night. Strain tightened his features.
“You’re worried your ma and the others will be wondering if you’re safe, I guess.”
He attempted a smile.
“It’ll take a bit for them to get the word on this business. RTE signal doesn’t reach out where they are.” Meaning no radio. “I thought about sending a telegram, let them know I’m okay, but Ma might get scared and imagine the worst before she even opened it.”
“He tried calling a cousin in town to ask him to go out to the farm, but the cable across the Atlantic was busy,” Seamus put in.
Other people were drifting in after me. Wee Willie and his brood came through the door. Willie and his oldest, who was all of nine, were lugging their radio. Finn cleared a place behind the bar for them to plug it in. Maire, with kids trailing, made a beeline to sit beside me.
“Oh, Maggie! What if Willie has to go?” She caught my hand and held on so hard it hurt.
“With every nun that ever knew him saying he’d take first place for being a troublemaker? The devil wouldn’t have him, let alone the army.”
We both knew it was a lie, but it made her smile. She kept holding my hand, though. Their daughter, who was youngest, climbed into her lap. Willie joined us, and Maire let go of my hand to take his. We made stabs at conversation. Now and then news trickled in on the radio. We’d shot down some Japanese planes. There were fires. NBC said a report they’d been getting from a station in Hawaii had been cut off by a telephone operator who said the line was needed for emergency use.
I felt wrapped in layers and layers of gauze. Everything seemed distant. People. Voices. Even my own. Yet as I sat and listened and looked, something started to wear a pinhole through the cocoon encasing me. A man. At the bar.
“Maggie?” Connelly was frowning at me.
“That man at the bar, the one just right of the taps. Has he been in before?” I didn’t ordinarily come to Finn’s on a Sunday. Maybe there was a different crowd.
“Can’t say I’ve ever seen him,” Connelly said.
Maybe it was someone new in town, or passing through, someone in need of other people around this afternoon like the rest of us. Except...
Except I’d seen him somewhere.
He wasn’t one of the thugs who’d tried to snatch Eve. Maybe I was only imagining a familiarity. Maybe I’d noticed him only because his tweed casual jacket didn’t show signs of wear like others in Finn’s. It was belted, and fit him so perfectly it had to be tailored. I’d bet a couple of nickels his cap was also top of the line. And his hair...
He had sideburns. That was it. Sideburns. Like the man in the restaurant last night.
I rose.
“Be right back,” I murmured in response to Connelly’s puzzled expression.
Behind the bar, running its length, a mirror taller than Finn’s head gave anyone sitting there a view of the room. As I started forward, the man I was watching slid from his stool. He sauntered toward the door. I picked up my pace. So did he. As I drew within six feet of him, a man burst in from the street.
“If there’s any cops in here, you better phone the station!” he shouted, wild eyed. “Them Gamewell call boxes are flashing like crazy!”