Chapter Nineteen
CHAPTER NINETEEN
O F ALL THE OUTWARD SIGNIFIERS HER DARLING J ULES USED TO KEEP society from speculating about his true nature, Evelyn always thought this was the funniest.
Boxing. Men held it up as the ultimate masculine activity, but from where she was sitting—a front-row bench on the south side of a hastily constructed boxing ring—she just saw sweaty, half-naked men grunting and colliding their slick bodies against one another for the enjoyment of other, generally intoxicated, generally single, men.
To female eyes, it seemed decidedly other than heterosexual.
But still, Evelyn loved the fights.
The back floor of a dockyard warehouse reeked of stale, melted sugar and the crowd was not what one might have called genteel, but in the warm embrace of the run-down, rusted building, crammed between Akio and some unenthused burly man with a thick push-broom mustache, she barely remembered Thomas Gallier or her bruised heart or how much it would sting to face him again.
The silver flask of cheap gin Akio freely shared certainly didn’t hurt matters, either.
The two undercard fights had been entertaining matches, but when a heavyset Irishman in rolled-up sleeves stepped onto the elevated canvas of the ring to announce the final bout, the crowd rang out with cheers. Evelyn added her voice to their din. Everyone knew that this was the fighter they’d really come to see. Jules Moreau.
“Gentlemen and ladies of ill repute …” the man called in a brogue so thick, Evelyn was certain half of the spectators wouldn’t understand him. “This is the moment I know you’ve been waiting for. The fight of the night. The …”
The Irishman went on, waxing poetic about the fighting styles of the two men in opposite corners of the ring. Though the alcohol racing through her bloodstream fuzzed the edges of Evelyn’s awareness, she leaned forward, glued to the drama about to unfold in front of her.
Akio, on the other hand, had no such focus. He knocked an elbow into her side.
“Evelyn?”
“Mm-hm?”
“That man beside you. Have you seen him here before?”
Confused, she shifted her gaze to the man in question, who didn’t seem the boxing type. Face featuring what she could only describe as a push broom of a mustache, his brow was too furrowed, his shirt pressed too cleanly, and he didn’t appear to have any booze in him whatsoever. An oddity in this scene.
Evelyn returned her gaze to the fight.
“No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“He’s very … still , don’t you think?”
Evelyn chuckled. “Not everyone is as animated as I am, Akio.”
That didn’t placate him.
“There’s something wrong here.”
“And what do you think that is, exactly?”
“These affairs aren’t precisely legal. You know that.”
As his whisper dissipated into the air like steamship smog, Evelyn’s entire attitude changed.
“You think he’s a cop?” she asked, lowering her voice to match Akio’s.
“It could be a raid. The bulls could come in any second and tear this place apart.”
The prospect cut through Evelyn’s tipsy buzz. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. In years past, their position at the top of the vaudeville circuit and their cozy connections with the upper class had protected Jules and Akio from the Manhattan Police Department. But now that they weren’t fashionable—now that the eyes of the city had turned elsewhere—there was no telling what an overzealous cop might do to a couple of famed “eccentrics.”
“What do you think we should do?” she asked, her eyes never leaving Jules. The crowds around them cheered and leapt to their feet as he successfully dodged his opponent, but Akio and Evelyn remained frozen, coiled in their seats. “Leave?”
“And abandon Jules? No. Under no circumstances. If we could get him out of the ring, maybe, but there’s no chance of that—”
As childhood friends scraping to make a living on the circuit, she and Jules had often run gambits around the food stalls in their neighborhood and on the road. With Jules’s natural grace, he made a quick and effective thief. And as for Evelyn?
She’d always been good at playing the distraction.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she muttered, rising to her feet and straightening her skirts.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting you two out of here.”