Читать книгу The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers - Thomas Mullen - Страница 12

Darcy woke amid newspapers, smudges on her cheek. Her head was a desert scoured by a sandstorm, and she had no memory of the event or whatever had preceded it, no memory of anything since that policeman had helped her back to her building. She was in bed, the sun rudely shouting through the windows, and the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was a headline about some FDR speech, and another about the Nazis’ latest grab for power, and another about…Yes, of course. That.

Darcy rose, and was reminded that she should move more slowly. Oh, my. She had forgotten about hangovers. If she drank in the face of death, what should she do after she’d stopped drinking? Death didn’t stop, so neither should the drinking. Sad how easily she slipped into past routines; this was how she had responded to her mother’s death, and now death was again chasing her to the bottle. Jason had always been so controlled, never overdoing anything, and she thought it had rubbed off on her. How sudden and irrevocable death was.

She rose from the bed and poured herself a gin. Then the bathroom, her penance, and next a long shower, holding the walls. Everything was vibrating, pulsating. She scrubbed the ink from her face and hands; she opened her mouth and drank hot mouthfuls from the shower. She wanted to clean her tongue, clean the insides of her skull. The worst part was knowing she would feel this way for so, so long.

Leaving the bathroom, she gathered up the newspapers, crushing the awful reality into a great crackling mass, and stuffed them into a wastebasket. The basket wasn’t big enough. She gathered the remainder and carried it into the kitchen, threw it into the bin. Her hands were filthy again. She walked back to the bathroom, willing herself not to cry, scrubbing at her fingers with soap, watching the dark remains of spiteful text swirl down the drain.

Minutes later, she was sipping ice water when the buzzer sounded. Western Union, the tired voice said. She buzzed him in before thinking that no one was supposed to know she lived here.

A knock on the door, a man in uniform sweating from the summer heat.

“Came by yesterday, ma’am, but there was no answer.”

She signed for the telegram without making eye contact. When he was gone, she tore it open. She read it once without understanding. She read it again. Images revealed themselves, sounds. Again. Voices now, textures. His laugh, the silk sleeve reaching out to touch her face.

PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER THAN PREDICTED / DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.

She crumpled to her knees. What?

“Don’t believe everything you read.” That’s what he always said, or some variation: don’t believe everything you hear, or everything they say, or everything you see, or everything you feel. His mantra—that life was a big trick, that the gullible were secretly guillotined while only those who doubted everything had a chance to escape. She had believed, for a day, and it had nearly killed her.

She was down the stairs and out the door in seconds. It was midday and the sidewalk was scalding on her bare feet. The Western Union truck’s engine had just started but she banged on the door before he could pull away. Who sent this?! When?! How?! The poor man didn’t know anything, shaking his head at her. There were no other messages, no other clues. Only this. A whisper in a graveyard. He drove off, left her standing there in her bathrobe, receiving looks.

Back inside, she tried Veronica again. Woman would not answer her phone. Did she know? Was she with them even now? Darcy hated her; she burned, envy lighting her aflame. She emptied the wastebasket, tore through the newspapers, and found the photographs. Well, they were grainy. She had thought that he looked so…different in them, but had assumed that was how it was in death. And now? She was crazy. Surely.

Could this be happening? She would kill him. If he were really alive, she would kill him when he came for her, for doing this to her. But, Lord, please let it be so.

She sat on the bed. She was crying again.

And, despite it all, there was pride. She knew it couldn’t possibly have ended this way, knew he wouldn’t have let that happen.

She remembered the time he first came for her, waiting on the sidewalk in front of his shiny new Ford. Here in Chicago, where an unconnected hoodlum like him was not welcome. Just standing there, as if absolutely certain that this was where he was meant to be.

She was off balance, amazed. The world was tipped from its axis, compasses swirling. But she did regain her composure enough to speak first, thank you.

“I’m afraid there’s no bank in my building, and my purse only holds so much,” she said.

It had been two weeks since her day on the running boards. After the brothers had left her at that farm, she had called the police, but mainly because she needed a ride home. She had found, when the cops questioned her, that she wasn’t all that interested in feeding them information; she had been vague in her answers, playing the role of flustered young lass until the cops pocketed their notebooks. Once back in Chicago, she’d read everything she could find about Jason at the library. He and his gang already had robbed another bank, or three, or seven, depending on which rumors were to be believed. Reporters couldn’t keep up: the Firefly Brothers were allegedly responsible for a train robbery in Utah, had orchestrated prison breaks in Missouri and Minnesota, robbed National Guard armories across the Midwest, and even made off with three fighter planes from a factory in western Pennsylvania, all in the past two weeks. They were suspected of being communist insurgents, or Nazi agents, or Confederate loyalists in the mold of Jesse James. They were committing crimes in Republican counties to help local Democrats in the upcoming election, or maybe the opposite. Mostly lies and conjecture, Darcy figured. But what fun it would be to try to find the truth hiding beneath it all.

She had seen an approximation of Jason’s face on a wanted poster outside the post office and had let her nails linger over the badly drawn cheek. Surely the police artist had never seen Jason Fireson with his own eyes, felt his presence.

“Could have sworn First National used to be here.” Jason’s suit might have been dark blue, but in the night it was black. “City’s changing so fast these days.”

“Or are you here because you’ve reconsidered kidnapping?”

It was cold and she could see her breath. They both could: he watched her breath hanging there and the moment felt even more intimate than when his eyes were on hers.

“I’m still not a fan of it, I have to admit. I had a feeling you might come willingly.”

“With a known desperado? What do you take me for?”

“A fascinating woman who hasn’t been fascinated enough.”

She stepped closer. She thought of that wanted poster, and she wanted her fingers on that cheek. “You’re offering me fascination?”

“I’m offering you an evening. For starters.”

She smiled. Except she’d been smiling the whole time. He made her put smiles on top of her smiles.

That had been barely ten months ago. Despite what she’d told that officer, they were not married. But a ring seemed trivial to her, as it must to him. She had no need for rings or necklaces, brooches or earrings, rocks or stones. Just him. Whether Jason had understood it or not, the money had never mattered to her.

He had wooed her for the better part of three weeks, like the carefree man of means he was. Each day, after she returned from her achingly dull job as a typist—her father had objected to her even having an occupation, as such servitude did not reflect well on the family name, but she refused to take another cent from him—Jason’s car would sidle up to the sidewalk. He took her to the sorts of nightclubs proper suitors would have been scandalized to set foot in, dancing her through the steps he knew and allowing her to show off the latest crazes; he escorted her to the World’s Fair, winning marksman contests and surveying his domain from the top of the Ferris wheel; he drove her through the countryside, gunning the V8 engine of his new coupe, testing the truthfulness of the salesman’s boasts; he bought tickets to air shows, the two of them lying beside each other on picnic blankets, their lazy fingers reaching up to trace the daredevils’ paths through the heavens.

Darcy had avoided alcohol ever since her initial troubles with it, but with Jason she found she was able to partake of a drink here and there. He always ordered but never had a second. She commented on this, and he said something about the need for control. Such calmness, so different from her. She wanted to sample all of life, and although she sensed this craving in him as well, it didn’t gnaw at him as it did her. He seemed to know he would get around to everything eventually, that there was no need to rush. It had to be an act, didn’t it? But my, such a good one.

On the tenth night of her whirlwind courtship, her father called her, asking who was this man she had been seen with. Seen by whom? Outraged, she had switched apartments the next day, moving to a different neighborhood, changing her telephone number, not leaving a forwarding address. It exhausted her meager funds, but Jason happily paid for the next three months’ rent; he had been spending the past few nights with her anyway.

What a strange new life, and so sudden. Darcy had returned to Chicago from boarding school a year earlier, having turned down her father’s invitations to be sent away to some girls’ college. She was sick of being sent away, imprisoned by others’ expectations. Wasn’t that what had finally driven her mother to despair? Marilyn Windham had been trapped by expectations that she couldn’t fulfill: being a kindly mother, the petite and smiling trophy for her tycoon husband, producing a male heir for his legacy. So she had broken free the only way she knew how. Darcy refused to let such onerous and limiting expectations be placed upon her. She had no interest in playing the society princess, the debutante, the prize for the next generation of financial barons.

In truth, she hadn’t known what did interest her, until the day Jason Fireson winked at her. It was tiresome, she had realized that day, to define yourself against things. So refreshing to find something you didn’t want to rebel against, something you wanted to wrap yourself inside.

After reading the telegram, Darcy hurriedly put on a white-flowered dress and light sweater and ran down the stairs. Her heart was frantic, and her stomach was reminding her that she hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. Life had returned, and she needed sustenance. She clasped the telegram in her right hand, folded in half.

“Excuse me, Miss Windham?”

A voice she did not recognize. You never knew how Jason would contact you, and she turned to face the man. But he wasn’t there.

She was about to turn again when she felt a hand clamping on her right forearm. A car had pulled up on her left, by a hydrant. There was another man, and a hand pushed her head down before she could see his face.

The men were moving toward the car and her feet did their part to keep up. Then she was in the backseat and someone pushed her head down again, and another set of hands was riffling through her hair. A tightness was pulled over her head, stopping at the eyes. Goggles? She felt them sucking at her skull. In front they were stuffed with dark cloth. Like the blindfold from that other time, but far less gentlemanly.

“Go!” someone hissed.

The car was moving when she asked if they were with Jason.

“Keep quiet and everything’ll be fine,” said a voice beside her.

“She say Jason?” someone asked from the front. “Doesn’t she know?”

“Know what?” Darcy asked.

Something jabbed her ribs. “You know what this is, doll? Keep talking and you’ll be as dead as your boyfriend.”

Darcy was very still even as the car took a sharp right. Jason had not sent these people.

She pressed her palms into each other, the fingers pulling on their opposites’ knuckles. The world around her was mad but she tried to be its calm center.

She felt very alone, and she had dropped the telegram.