Chapter Seven #2
Jack was standing in the breeze of the opened window, eating a shrimp-and-cucumber canape, when a walnut panel in the wall next to the fireplace began to silently slide open.
Jack stole a calculated look around him.
He was the only one who seemed to notice when Truman stepped into the vast room, closed the door behind him, and clapped his hands.
The guests turned with delighted gasps.
“Welcome!” Truman said, raising a martini glass with a yellow curl of citrus rind. “I propose a toast—to all of you, and to a week of events that begins now, the likes of which none of us are soon to forget.”
The room exploded in cheers and raucous applause.
Jack smiled and took a pretend sip of his drink. He gripped the tumbler in his hand. He had waited for this moment for so long.
Three of the male guests were playing cards on an oak table.
Two women he recognized from the silver screen were draped over their chairs.
The table top was scattered with cards that appeared to be from Byrd’s custom deck.
They were filigreed with gold leaf and featured different suits of birds.
Quails for queens, peacocks for kings. Jack’s fingers itched to hold those cards himself, but he waited.
Took out a cigar and lit it, letting the smoke waft toward the opened window as he observed.
It was almost jarring, how removed the Hill felt from the rest of the world.
It had risen above the clouds like a golden tower, absent the raw desperation that coated the people below it like grime.
Over the years spent in back-room dens and high-stakes poker tables, Jack had learned to recognize the aura of money.
The guests who came from old money had a cloying sense of assurance, of immovability, an iron horse with its hooves staked down through a marble pillar.
As for those with new money—the rising starlets like Clementine, the freshly made oil barons—they had a dizzying sort of electric energy that rose like fumes from their skin.
At first, Jack had mistaken it for charisma or luck.
But he saw it now for what it was: someone walking a tightrope, giddy and on top of the world, knowing that any moment they could fall with the slightest misstep. Or the slightest push.
And with the economy collapsing, and the stain spreading out from Black Thursday so banks were folding faster than houses of cards, it was a longer way to fall than ever.
“Everett Conner!” Truman Byrd suddenly boomed. He moved toward Jack, but his face was devoid of humor. Jack watched him approach, the expression on his face inscrutable. He felt a surge of nerves.
“Truman,” Jack said, extending his hand. “Good to see you again.” As Truman’s hand closed around his, he did not flinch. He kept his mind clear of what he had come there to do, so that not even a hint of it could be read on his face.
“You were early today,” Truman said. He took a long drag of his cigar and fixed Jack with an intense gaze. “Took us all by a bit of surprise.”
Jack smiled and felt the trickle of sweat down his back. “I guess my anticipation got the better of me,” he said. He raised his hands in surrender. “Ever since our time in Reno, I’ve been itching for a rematch.”
Truman studied him for a long moment.
“You’re a damn good card player,” he said gruffly. His face suddenly broke into a grin. “I’ve got some people for you to beat.” He clapped Jack on the back, and Jack leaned forward to mask his relief.
“Please tell me one of these rooms has a roulette machine made from solid gold in it,” he said conspiratorially.
“The real kick,” Truman said, with a sharp wink, “is that you have to find it first. Now, let me introduce you around.”
He started with Governor Gilham. “Gilly, this is Everett Conner. We met last year in Nevada. Best chap at craps I’ve ever seen. I brought him up on the Hill almost solely for your entertainment.”
Jack nodded. “Nice to make your acquaintance, Governor.”
“Call me Ted, here. Please. I like to be on a first-name basis with someone before I take their money.” He laughed riotously, and Jack stole a quick glance at the paintings hanging on the wall behind the governor’s head. He calculated their size and weight, almost as a compulsion.
He couldn’t help himself.
“Everett, is it?” Clementine Garver’s voice rang out like bells behind him.
Jack recognized her instantly from the film The Man from the Docks.
Beyond her was Lola Iris, a woman he had seen only in magazines.
Part of him never truly believed they were real until they were there standing in front of him, close enough to touch.
They smelled like narcissus and rainwater.
“Miss Garver,” he said, giving her a slight bow. “I fear to find that somehow you’re even more charming than I had imagined.”
“I’m always delighted to best an imagination,” she said with a lovely smile. It widened with a touch of wickedness. “A rather intimate accomplishment, I would think.” She leaned forward almost imperceptibly. “Have you met my dear friend Rita?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” Jack said. He tried to keep his eyes from straying to the large jewel on Clementine’s forehead.
“You’re the card player who Truman keeps raving about,” Rita said, studying him over the rim of her glass.
“Yes, he says you’re unbeatable,” Clementine said. “A master of your craft.”
“Cards are little more than luck,” Jack said, raising his own glass to his lips. “The deck’s the real master. I’m just its obliging servant.”
“I’m sure it’s a mix of being dealt a good hand and bringing two of your own to the table,” Rita said, tilting her head.
Kitty Ryan bit her lip. “Yes, I’ve often found that good hands have quite a lot to do with getting lucky.”
Jack gave them a knowing grin. The starlets laughed in delight and sauntered away.
Ronald Rutherford, Byrd’s long-time friend and adviser, puffed on a cigar.
He made a singular round of the room, shaking hands with all the men, and then stepped back into the shadows alongside the head of security.
The two of them stood together, making conversation—but really, Jack could tell, they were watching every move.
Their eyes missed nothing. He would have to be exceedingly careful around those two.
Jack wondered what Leo would think if he could see this. He thought of his older brother squeezing his eyes tight, playing the violin. Then of the cold, black water of the Bay.
Of the guard, looking up at them in terror. Choking on his own blood.
Jack turned away.
Out of the corner of his eye, one of the maids walked past him, her head down.
Something stirred in him when she passed. A flicker of something familiar, something buried from long ago. It can’t be, he thought to himself.
It was just his conscience, rising up to play tricks on him at the most inconvenient times.
The maid reminded him of that young girl, with the auburn hair and the bright, gold-ringed eyes.
The picture of innocence somehow blooming right in the midst of Pelican.
She used to venture out of the guard cottages with a ribbon in her hair, and she reminded him of his younger cousins—a deep breath of pure air.
He would talk to her through the fence. It was the only true kindness he remembered from over the better part of two years.
“Did you sing at Christmas?” he had once asked the girl.
It was tradition, on Christmas night, that the families of the guards would sing carols first at the warden’s house, and then to the prisoners.
She had given a shy nod with that sharp chin of hers, and he remembered how cold his fingers were as they twined around the wire fence.
He had spoken so quietly, he wasn’t even sure that she’d heard: “Thank you. Hearing those songs was the first time I have felt like myself again.”
It had reminded him of church. Of the golden mosaics. Of his mother, singing next to him.
He would see a flash of the girl’s face sometimes, in a store window. Someone walking down that dusty little street in Bakersfield. On a train in Albuquerque. The underground bar in Reno. It was never really her. Just a wisp, a figment, his own guilty conscience.
He raised his drink to his lips, pretended to drink it, and put that impossible thought out of his mind.
After dinner, Cora wound her way through the mild evening air. Shadows swept across the esplanade like silk, and the orbed lampposts were lit in a circle of white moons. Down on the lower veranda, a live band was tuning. For once, Cora was glad to see the night guardsmen strolling the grounds.
The moon hung low and bright in the sky, and Cora was careful to keep her face always turned away from the light.
She glanced over suddenly at the sound of Clementine’s delighted laugh.
Jack was at her elbow. His face was cut with angles, a sharp jaw and cheekbones, and he looked debonair even among the film stars in his white-tie tailcoat evening wear.
She still remembered the battle she had fought with herself the day after they had first met.
She had gone back and forth between fear and curiosity, and curiosity won out.
The first encounter had been an accident.
A mistake. The second one was deliberate.
She had found a marigold that he had tied with a short, frayed piece of twine along the barbed-wire fence. As though it had been left for her. She had carefully unraveled it and taken it home. Tucked it into her copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
No one had ever given her a flower before. Not even her father.
How stupidly easy it had been.
“You ever had Moxie, Cora?” Jack asked the next day, when she went out to the fence. He said it as if they were already old friends.
She paused. “No,” she said. “My mother doesn’t buy it.”
“Well. It tastes a bit like molasses and old cigarettes that have been doused together in kerosene.”