Under ripe, dark clouds Franklin roamed the twisting lanes of the financial district. It was a hot spring day and he was sure he could smell money—dank as the cabbage and lettuce that clotted the gutters in other neighborhoods—rotting in the underground vaults of the big banks. Certainly little of this money was gathering in people’s pockets, he thought, as he negotiated the grim crowds with placards (LIFE, LIBERTY, AND A LIVING WAGE) milling outside the Stock Exchange.
Back in New York now, it seemed all Franklin could think about was money, for the simple reason that he didn’t have any. He felt adrift and at the same time stuck fast, waiting for the patent to be approved on his paint-shaking machine. Once the patent went through, and he obtained financial backing, he could go into production, and after that realize his dream of setting up a proper workshop. There he would have the materials—and, most importantly, the time—to produce his other inventions. But an awful lot of pieces had to fall into place before that happened, first and foremost the patent. For seven months he had been waiting to hear from the patent office, but it was only in the last month (after yet another form letter reiterated the fact his application was “under review”) that he found himself nearly broke. He’d had to budget himself to one dollar a day in meal money: 10¢ for breakfast; 25¢ for lunch; 50¢ for dinner—and 15¢ for Archie’s mackerel filets from the fishmonger.
While working for Samuel Carstone, Franklin had learned about patents: that they remain in effect for seventeen years, and then are renewable; that patenting an invention does not give you the right to manufacture it, but, rather, forbids anyone else from doing so. So long as he held the patent on a paint-shaking machine, no one else could produce such a device without securing his permission—and paying him a fee. Many inventions were never manufactured at all—or only after long delays—so it might turn out that another inventor had once dreamed up a paint-shaking machine, patented it, and then shelved his blueprint. It was this possibility that some clerk in Washington was investigating.
In New York, Franklin followed the same daily routine: first searching halfheartedly for work, then for diversion, and finally, uncharacteristically, just looking to kill time. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so low-down. All he was sure about was that he had just enough money to get by for another month. He was desperate enough to think about going back to work for Samuel Carstone— he had an open invitation to do so—but he resisted the temptation. He remembered his Aunt Vita telling him he must never go backward, never allow that to be a refuge. So as the days passed, Franklin was ready to toss aside his notions of a “job” and take whatever pickup work he could find. He and a million other guys, he thought.
He woke late every morning in his rented room on Charles Street near the river. Archie, who slept across his ankle, soft and warm, would be sitting up eagerly in a shaft of sunlight. Franklin’s few clothes hung in the closet and he had the photograph of the woman on the bridge propped up on the dresser, facing the bed. At night he fell asleep gazing at her, thinking she too seemed to have paused in her journey, and he tried to find reassurance in her eyes that both of them would be moving on again soon.
After feeding Archie, he shaved and put on his one suit—dark blue, double-breasted—and one of the three shirts that he alternately washed in the sink and hand-ironed. Then he spent his breakfast dime on coffee and a doughnut at the lunch wagon on West Street and, rain or shine, set out for the Battery.
He felt at ease in the commotion alongside the river: the traffic screeching by on the West Side Highway, the IRT trains rumbling on the elevated line, the trucks from Jersey making deliveries at the
Greenwich Street warehouses. He passed WPA crews constructing piers and customshouses for the Port Authority. He watched ocean liners from Le Havre and Rio—their passengers bunched beneath flapping pennants—enter New York Harbor flanked by tugboats. And finally there was the Staten Island ferry, coming and going like clockwork. Commuters and sightseers poured through the wooden turnstiles every quarter hour as the bell tolled at the marine fire-house, scattering the gulls.
Battery Park was busy at noon. Secretaries on lunch break eating sandwiches, bicycle messengers sprawled in the grass, and old men poring over the racing forms, smoking cigars. The big buildings rose like a wall at the foot of the harbor. Thousands of windows sparkled in the light. Franklin imagined the office workers rustling pieces of paper behind those windows. Millions of letters, reports, memoranda changing hands, being posted or filed away. He knew for many men this was how the future was manifesting itself—a world of paper they deemed more real than the world itself—and he wanted no part of that.
Letting the sun warm him on a wooden bench by the old Dutch fort, he tried to plot his next move. Since Chicago, he felt everything had come to a standstill. He blamed this on the snail’s-pace workings of the Patent Office. But he knew it was also the result of what had transpired with Narcissa months before, the energy and money he had expended in searching for her—with disastrous results.
When Franklin first arrived in New York, he had gone directly to the Hotel Maroc, on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, where she had told him she would be staying. He wanted to surprise her—for he had concluded his business in Dayton, not in two weeks, but six days. Instead, she had surprised him. Narcissa was gone, not just from the Hotel Maroc, but from the city itself.
Franklin was told she had checked into another hotel down the street, the Prince Albert, but the desk clerk there had no record of it. He went to the Silver Blue Records studio on 116th Street, but it was closed. After asking around in vain at various clubs and restaurants, he returned to the record studio. Tampa Red, the bottleneck guitarist, was just beginning a session with a backup quartet. The engineer told Franklin guardedly that, yes, Narcissa had been there, cut six songs in two nights, and then gone on tour.
“Where?” Franklin asked.
“Baltimore, Philly, I dunno. But south.”
“With Bat and Eight Ball?”
The engineer scrutinized him—a white man with a three-day beard and sleepless eyes—and cocked his head skeptically. “You know them?”
“Doesn’t it sound like it?”
“Yeah, they were with her. Monroe Greenwood, too, on guitar, and Jimmy Hopkins the cornet player. The same cats she recorded with.”
“They must have put this tour together pretty fast.”
The engineer lit a cigarette and shrugged.
“And Ferret Hawkins went with them?”
“I should think so. Seeing as they was calling it a honeymoon tour.”
“What?”
“Narcissa and him was married on Sunday afternoon.”
Franklin felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. “That can’t be true.”
“Maybe not, but I was there. Church of the Nazarene near the park. Afterward Ferret served up a banquet at Flora’s Algiers. A big spread, and plenty of Cuban rum. Cats jammed straight through the night.”
Flora’s Algiers was a club near the East River, and Flora was a two-hundred-pound woman dressed in a man’s black suit, black shirt, and fat yellow tie. A girl about eighteen in a silver cocktail dress was sitting on her lap at one of the tables when Franklin came in at dusk, before the club opened.
“Oh yeah,” Flora replied, eyeing Franklin, “they were married, then gone the next day. The bride was pretty, all right, but she likes the juice.” Flora nodded slowly, then studied Franklin again, up and down. “You sure you not a federal man?”
“I’m sure.”
“I never did serve liquor during the Prohibition. Yeah, I got my license now and I grease the police every month.”
Franklin was off balance, guilty that he had let Narcissa go when she pleaded with him not to, and angry that she had betrayed him. Their relationship may have been on the skids, but he hadn’t expected it to end like this. He needed to see her again, to bring things to a close—or at least not to have everything left hanging. He dropped Archie off with a former coworker at Carstone’s lab, a retired lady, and boarded the night train to Baltimore. He went to a club the engineer had mentioned, and learned that Narcissa’s next stop had been Richmond. In Richmond, he was told she was in Atlanta. In Atlanta, the trail went cold. The manager of the Palmetto Club told him she had never showed up to do her gig. Franklin went back to the club for two more nights, listening to the different acts, drinking bourbon sours at the bar, hoping she might turn up. On the second night, there was a new bartender.
“Narcissa Stark?” he said, shaking Franklin’s drink. “The new girl, yeah. She went straight on to Miami. Plans to do a gig in Havana. Good money down there, and you know they like the blues.” He laughed. “But only when the ladies sing ‘em. We call that honey-trap blues.”
In Miami the heat was steaming off the pavement, misting in the trees. The coconut palms swayed on the beaches. The whiteness of the sand hurt Franklin’s eyes. The tropical smells made him sad for the places he had left before he came back to the States. To Alabama, and Chicago, and the bitter winter. To Narcissa.
Franklin was exhausted. He hired a private detective for twenty-five dollars and then went to sleep in his rented room. It took the detective a single day to find her. Mr. and Mrs. Ferret Hawkins had registered at the Casa Mirabell, a pale blue hotel in a
Negro neighborhood. As he walked up the front steps, Franklin asked himself what he was doing there. Playing the wounded Romeo, the aggrieved party, would he demand an explanation? And then what? How could he have hoped to find closure in such a mess?
He sat in the lobby of the Casa Mirabell for three hours. Night was falling. The hotel bar was growing noisy. He had two brandies. Finally Ferret Hawkins walked in wearing a white suit. He had a companion, a big black man in a brown and red striped suit and a derby. Puffing a cigar, Hawkins didn’t act surprised when he saw Franklin.
“I expected you’d turn up somewhere,” he drawled.
“Where’s Narcissa?”
“My wife,” Hawkins smirked, “just sailed for Havana. I take the aeroplane tomorrow, to meet her.”
“You’re lying.”
“Who’s this?” the big man frowned. He had a wide flat face and small eyes.
“Nobody,” Hawkins said. “A onetime good Samaritan.”
So Narcissa had told Hawkins how they’d met, Franklin thought. He didn’t like that—didn’t like, from Hawkins’s expression, the way he imagined it had been told. It emptied him right out. And suddenly he didn’t care where Narcissa was.
“Let me buy you a drink,” Hawkins said.
“Fuck you.”
“Hey,” the big man said, taking a step toward Franklin.
“It’s all right,” Hawkins said, putting his hand on the big man’s arm. Then he turned back to Franklin and smacked his lips. “You’re the one looks like he could use some fucking.”
“Yeah? I’d rather watch you two fuck each other.”
“Hey,” the big man repeated, pushing Hawkins aside. “Or maybe you’d like to watch me cut out your heart.” He reached into his pocket, and an instant later was pressing a switchblade into Franklin’s ribs. “Let’s step out for some air.”
"Kelvin, forget this shit,” Hawkins said.
“You forget it. We’re going outside. Take the side door, white boy—behind the coat check.”
They went out, down some steps, into a cement courtyard. Two bellboys were sitting on a bench, smoking.
“Keep going,” the big man muttered, pushing Franklin through a gate into the street behind the hotel. A sleepy dusty street. Black cars were parked under the trees. A radio was jangling in a window.
Franklin’s head was just catching up to his mouth. All the drinking, and no sleep, and he’d painted himself into a nasty corner.
The big man grabbed him by the throat and pushed him up against a tree. “You want to say that again, about who’s gonna fuck who? ‘Cause I’m gonna fuck you up good.”
“No.”
“Say it!”
Hawkins was just watching now, his eyes slits, enjoying it.
Franklin shook his head defiantly.
The big man tightened his grip on Franklin’s throat. “Doesn’t matter, ‘cause I’m still gonna fuck you up.”
“Go ahead, then, you cocksucker,” Franklin croaked.
The big man glanced at Hawkins. “He’s got balls, don’t he,” he snickered. “At least for now.”
Franklin braced himself, expecting any second to feel the knife blade thrusting into him. He felt his legs shaking.
Suddenly a voice snapped, “Put your hands up,” and Franklin realized it wasn’t Hawkins or the big man speaking.
“What the hell,” the big man muttered, wheeling around.
“Fucker,” Hawkins exclaimed.
“Now!" the voice ordered them. “And drop the knife.”
The knife clattered to the pavement, and Franklin gasped for air as the big man released his throat.
“You, too!" the voice snapped at him.
Franklin raised his hands and saw another black man step from the shadows, pointing a pistol at the three of them. He was young, about Franklin’s size, wearing a straw hat and a florid blue shirt. Franklin watched him reach into the big man’s jacket and snatch away his wallet.
“You know who you’re fuckin’ with, Jack?” the big man said.
“Shut up,” the stickup man replied, cocking his pistol. He checked Franklin’s inside pocket and found nothing. “Give it over,” he ordered him.
As Franklin unbuttoned his back pocket, he caught a flurry of movement out of his right eye. Then a flash and an explosion.
Ferret Hawkins had drawn his own pistol, and diving to the ground, fired at the stickup man. Franklin dived, too, and flattened himself while four more shots rang out. When the smoke cleared, he raised his head: Hawkins had been shot in the chest, the big man in the leg, and the stickup man had a large chest wound. The big man was cursing and writhing in the dust, but Hawkins and the stickup man weren’t moving at all. Blood was pouring from their wounds, and from Hawkins’s mouth into his thick beard. His white jacket was soaked red. Franklin felt his stomach turn. He had to get out of there. But as he jumped to his feet, he heard shouts down the street, and a police whistle, and those two bellboys came through the gate, gaping.
Two hours later, a pair of detectives were questioning Franklin outside the emergency room of St. Brendan the Voyager Hospital on Meridian Avenue.
“You’ve been shot,” one of them had pointed out when they arrived at the shooting scene.
Franklin was so shaken up he hadn’t realized the stinging in his arm was a bullet wound. But he had only been grazed, and after cleaning and stitching the wound and giving him a tetanus shot, the doctors released him.
Ferret Hawkins had not been so lucky. While Franklin had been horrified to see the life flowing out of Hawkins, he wasn’t shedding crocodile tears after the fact. All he could think was that Narcissa was a widow again, and he wondered if she had really flown to Havana or was still somewhere in Miami. He didn’t know what he would have said to her, and at that moment it didn’t seem to matter anymore. He just felt a huge sadness weighing on him. And it would be a long time—seemingly many lifetimes for both of them—before he laid eyes on her again.
The big man, according to the police, was one Kelvin LeFaye. He was a racketeer out of New Orleans of interest to them for a variety of reasons, including a Louisiana warrant for his arrest for first-degree murder.
The stickup man was still in surgery, but given little chance of survival. Of all the bizarre turns in this episode, it was his identity that most shocked Franklin. When the man was lying wounded, his straw hat knocked off and the blood bubbling up beneath his blue shirt, Franklin hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. Even if he had, he wasn’t sure he would have easily recognized him. But now, when one of the detectives mentioned the man’s name, it jolted Franklin.
“Louis Talman,” the detective said. “Address unknown. Alabama driver’s license. He’s been picked up twice this year here in Miami for suspicion of robbery. Now, you say you knew the dead man Hawkins up north, that you were conversing with him. About what?”
Franklin thought it prudent not to bring up his relationship with Narcissa. Not with Southern cops. “I won’t lie to you,” he replied. “I was looking for a crap game. He said he could direct me.”
“You gamble with colored?”
Franklin shrugged. “In Chicago, yeah.”
“Down here I wouldn’t do it,” the detective grunted. “You’re liable to find more of what you got today. Any other business in Miami besides craps?”
“To get a little sun.”
“Ever seen Kelvin LeFaye before this afternoon?”
“No.”
Franklin shook his head. This was another Pandora’s box. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“Well, I guess we got Talman dead to rights now,” the detective said. “If he lives, that is. Don’t matter if he was robbing Kelvin LeFaye or the governor himself, he was still robbing.”
Louis Talman didn’t live. After three hours on the operating table, he suffered a cardiac arrest.
As for Franklin, in his formal statement he continued to depict himself as a man caught in the crossfire during a botched robbery. A white man in the wrong place at the wrong time, as the white detectives blithely observed before sending him on his way. With Talman dead, there would be no trial for the murder of Hawkins, and they didn’t need help in putting away Kelvin LeFaye, so at best Franklin was a distraction whom they were happy to have out of the picture, officially and otherwise. When he scanned the crime blotter in the late edition of the Miami Herald, he wasn’t even mentioned as a bystander in the piece that began: "Two Negroes killed and a notorious murderer apprehended outside the Casa Mirabell…" From what he read between the lines, he felt sure Kelvin LeFaye was going to be railroaded for killing Hawkins and Talman—maybe to save on the cost of an extradition to Louisiana.
Grounded by a couple of cheese sandwiches and some black coffee at the train station’s cafe´, his arm in a sling, Franklin had just boarded the late-night express for New York when it hit him full-force how narrowly he had escaped death on that dusty street.
Propped up in his sleeping berth, he pulled down the window shade and switched off the light. He thought about Louis Talman, about lifting him out of the mud and carrying him on his back in the darkness. In the last year, traveling from rural Alabama to downtown Miami, Talman had graduated from ne’er-do-well to violent criminal. Was it for this that his life had been spared? Or the fact that in his last hour he would unknowingly repay in full the debt he owed to Franklin Flyer—a man he wouldn’t have known from any other.
In November, when he was reduced to eating boiled potatoes and sauerkraut—he couldn’t afford the knockwurst—Franklin spent fifteen dollars making the overnight trip to Washington for a futile visit to the Patent Office. It was his return journey that was unusual.
First, he ran into Tommy Choylo, Ignatius Devine’s right-hand man, at Union Station. Choylo was with Dr. Volonz, the German geologist from the Argentine expedition. Choylo had a moustache now, full and black. He wore a tweed suit over a turtleneck sweater. Volonz, in a leather trench coat, was still chain-smoking cigarillos. They were sitting on a bench in the waiting room, and Choylo, over the top of his newspaper, recognized Franklin after several seconds. He was surprised, and not pleased, when Franklin approached them.
“Hello, Flyer,” he said.
“You remember me, then?”
“Of course. Our earnest interpreter—remember, Volonz?”
It was clear that Volonz didn’t.
“Here on zilium business?” Franklin said, watching them both closely.
Volonz stiffened, but Choylo didn’t even blink.
It was unlike Franklin to drop his guard so recklessly. But after cooling his heels at the Patent Office, he found in this chance encounter an opportunity to vent some of his frustration. And, even after three years, his brief association with Devine continued to leave a bad taste in his mouth. Choylo, a soulless bully, had particularly rankled him.
“Zilium—we gave up on it a long time ago,” Choylo replied in his oiliest voice.
"Really? I thought by now it would have found its way from Buenos Aires to Berlin.”
Choylo’s thin smile tightened, and Volonz, already pale, went even whiter.
“Dr. Volonz,” Franklin continued, “excuse my rudeness. Congratulations are in order.”
Volonz stood up, buttoning his coat. “What do you mean?”
“Chancellor Hitler’s election. You’re a National Socialist, are you not?”
“I am a member of the science faculty at the University of Heidelberg,” Volonz said coldly, “visiting here with a legation of my colleagues.”
“I see.” Franklin turned back to Choylo. “And how is Dr. Devine, by the way?”
“Very well.”
“Is he here, too?”
“He’s in London,” Choylo said, clipping his words. “You seem to remember a good deal, Flyer.”
Franklin shrugged. “Enough.”
“And what are you doing these days?”
“I’m afraid I’ve contracted the national malady: I’m unemployed.”
“That’s too bad.”
The train for Chicago was announced, and exchanging glances, Choylo and Volonz picked up their suitcases.
“We have to go,” Choylo said, turning on his heel.
“Good to see you,” Franklin called after them, sitting down and opening his own paper.
But a minute later, he was following Choylo and Volonz through the crowded corridor to the gates. Bypassing the gate for the Chicago train, they made straight for the overnight express to Montreal that was already boarding. From behind a pillar, Franklin saw another man, in a black cashmere coat and gray homburg, join them at the last moment. Franklin glimpsed only his broad shoulders from behind, but he was certain the man was Ignatius Devine. Which meant that Choylo, still keeping the company of Nazis, had lied to him on several counts. And Franklin felt sure he was lying about the zilium, too.
The second odd occurrence on that trip began when Franklin was awakened from a deep sleep on the return journey to New York. It was late afternoon, and, with a lurch, the train had slowed to a crawl at a crossing in the Delaware countryside. Franklin had been leaning his head against the window, and his eyes snapped open to a stream, its banks lined with birch trees. The sun was bathing a stone bridge in amber light. On the bridge a fair-haired young woman in a camel’s hair coat was leaning on the railing, gazing into the rush of water. Just as she glanced up at the train, it picked up speed. Rubbing his eyes in disbelief, Franklin pushed open his window and strained to look back at the bridge, but by then the train had left the crossing behind.
Long afterward Franklin continued to ask himself whether he had seen the woman or imagined her. Perhaps if his train had not slowed at that particular crossing he would not have found himself the following week standing before the Ice & Fire Assurance Company Building. Wandering midtown Manhattan, following a zigzag route along the windy streets, the shadows frantic in bright sunlight, he had felt something stronger than the wind tugging him along. In theory, he was out job-hunting, but after lingering in the diner across the street and entering the tall snow-white building, he wasn’t kidding himself: five years after his hat had blown through the window of Room 6000, five years after he had come upon the photo of the woman on the bridge, he wanted to revisit that office and see who the current tenant was.
Riding up in the elevator, he brushed the dust from his jacket and ran a comb through his hair. He felt excited, as he hadn’t in some time, and regretted that, distracted as he had been, with dwindling resources, he hadn’t returned to this place sooner.
He walked down the long marble corridor and stood before the door of Room 6000. This time there was the name of a business painted on the frosted glass: ZUHL PUBLICATIONS. He could also hear bustle from within: voices, typewriters clattering, a ringing telephone.
He opened the door and walked in. The room’s layout was completely different: a jumbled arrangement of desks, drawing boards, and swivel chairs accommodating a half-dozen people bent over their work.
The receptionist, a small white-haired woman with a phone at her ear, smiled at him. “May I help you?”
Before he could reply, another woman, around thirty, wearing a dark blue dress, looked up from one of the drawing boards and called out, “Are you here about the job?”
He hesitated for an instant, before answering, “Yes, I am.”
She was tall and raven-haired, with wide black eyes. “Come in, then,” she said impatiently, striding over to the reception desk and shaking his hand. “I’m Persephone Eckert.”