Chapter Eleven
“Cora-thorn,” her father said gruffly.
She could hear the shift of him as he turned away from the office, probably shielding the receiver with his large, coarse hand. At the familiar sound of his voice, she felt swept away by a sudden gust of homesickness.
“How’s it, Da?” she asked.
“Same as usual,” he said wearily. “Chief Bellanger has been in a bit of a lather.”
“Oh? What is it this time?”
“Somehow a bookie dumber than a box of rocks has managed to elude him.”
“What’s a step below a dumb bookie?” she asked, twisting the telephone cord round her finger. “Sentient algae?”
“I believe it’s egg salad.”
She felt her heart lightening. This was what she wanted, what she yearned for. He had grown distant in the years after Pelican, and she hadn’t known why—because of what happened with his job? Because her mother died? Because she was growing up?
Or had he known what she did?
She smiled into the telephone, and then choked back a vague threat of tears.
She thought of her father’s head, downturned for weeks after Jack’s escape, walking past the newspaper stands in the streets that screamed his failure.
She thought of the endless months he had to send out resumes to jobs further and further from the work he wanted to do, while her mother lay dying.
The empty silence of the telephone, and the mail slot that held only bills.
She cleared her throat.
“How’s things over there? You pouring the champagne yet?” He kept his tone light, but they both knew what he was saying. Mabel’s deadline was almost there, lurking in the shadows.
“Not quite.” She paused. “But I might have found a wrench here, to get things moving,” she said, lowering her voice into the telephone.
She could almost feel her father’s interest heighten, and she relished it.
When she had first taken the job from Mabel, the old hunger had risen in his blood, and he showed more interest in their conversations than he had in years.
This job had brought them closer together than they had been since Pelican.
“Which one is it, then?” he asked. “Lust, jealousy, anger, greed?”
“Jealousy,” she said.
He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “You got your gun?”
“Mm,” she said.
“Then twist the wrench until it cracks.”
She could picture him as he was, tapping the right side of his face, where the skin had started to sag like a stone’s throw of ripples. Home was something else Cora had lost in a moment at fifteen. Now the closest thing she had to it was a person.
And she couldn’t give him up yet.
“Have you heard from that Bobby of yours at all, Cora-thorn?” he asked. She winced at the sound of hope in his voice.
“Actually, no.” She cleared her throat. “I’m told that he was recently married to someone else,” she said, closing her eyes.
She felt a pang at saying the words out loud. He had tried so hard to love her. But she had never fully allowed him in.
“I always feel like you’re holding something back,” he had told her one night when they’d both had too much to drink.
They had been sitting in a booth at their favorite speakeasy, and her tongue was loose and slurring.
She had almost told him then. Almost taken the key he had offered and gotten herself out of the cell.
Shame was a lonely, barren place, a place she had lived for so long.
For one brief second she thought: maybe he wouldn’t think it was that horrible, what she had done.
But then, with a cold, dank fear, she thought: But what if he did?
She had looked into his eyes and hesitated. “There’s nothing,” she had said softly, and felt the key he had handed her slip from her hand. “You know everything about me.”
He had kissed her then, hungrily. “And I love you,” he said. “I would love you no matter what.”
She had felt the first crack that night, one that would eventually splinter out and make it impossible for her to keep him.
What he sensed was right; she was holding back the deepest parts of her that he could never know, not truly.
Later that night, she had gone to throw her dog tag off the Brooklyn Bridge; but at the last moment, she pulled her arm back and saved it.
The wind whipped at her hair, and she placed the dog tag back in her pocket.
She had been wearing red lipstick and her dead mother’s dress.
At twenty-four, she was still the same gnarled, broken person inside who she had been ever since she first heard the Pelican guard alarms blaring and the black phone going off in her house.
She remembered the way her father had reached for his rifle, the flare of spotlights, bright and sharp as cut glass; the guard dogs, bared teeth, barking.
Then later, when Cora had to pack up their house, take her grandmother’s picture off the wall, and get on the ferry for the last time, she’d seen the dragonflies, their wings reflecting like oil slicks in the sun.
“Well.” Her father cleared his throat, and then the silence hung between them. They had never been very good at navigating emotional waters without her mother there as a sandbar, a place of safety and refuge between them.
“I’m okay, Da,” she told him quietly. She traced the whorls of wood with her fingertip. They had one check-in left before the job was through.
“Cora,” her father said brusquely. “The end is always the trickiest.”
She knew it was the closest thing he would say to “I love you.”
“I know,” she said.
She hung up.
There was a brisk knock on the door. “Almost done in there?” a male voice asked from just outside the telephone booth. It was Matias, the chauffeur. The one who had helped Mabel get Cora this job.
“Just a minute,” she called.
Cora rolled up her skirt and looked at the number she had written on her thigh.
MU-5275.
Her pulse rose as she turned back on the stool. She dialed the number and listened to it ring.
The ringing cut short.
A voice heavy with an Irish accent answered.
“Muddy Dahlia’s.”
She breathed, then set the telephone down carefully with a click. It was what she had feared.
The Muddy Dahlia was an Irish pub in New York that was little more than a front for a mob joint. Its symbol was the Irish pinwheel dahlia, a flower that was golden in color and striped with red from the inside out. Like it had been shot.
Her heart beat faster.
“All yours,” she said to Matias, opening the door to let him in. Jack was in this up to his neck, and she had a sudden, choking feeling that she was treading water over something that was about to swallow her whole.
Truman finalized the evening dinner preparations with Rather, his head of staff, before walking the grounds.
Drawn toward the distant sound of laughing, he leaned against the carved balcony overlooking the pool.
He relished the way his guests waved at him and cheered, raising their glasses.
He could smell the jasmine pooling off the blossoms, reaching toward the two cranes Florence had carved as the laddered entrances into the water.
zTruman felt the sudden presence of a man at his elbow—someone rather squat, who had a towel draped across his hips and a straw boater hat perched jauntily on his head. Truman wasn’t a small man by any means, but he positively felt like a giant next to Albert Boyle.
“Berty,” Truman said, acknowledging him with smug amusement. “It’s an interesting look, to choose a hat over a shirt.”
“I call it a topless hat,” Berty said.
What Boyle lacked in size he made up for in antics.
Across the veranda, Truman caught a slightly disapproving look from Rutherford.
“People like Berty are fine enough company for the image of a Hollywood czar,” Truman could almost hear Rutherford saying in a low voice in his ear, ashing his cigar.
“Not as good for a high-ranking senator, or possibly the president of the United States.” Truman caught Rutherford’s eye and tipped his cap.
He could almost read Rutherford’s thoughts across the expanse of sky.
But they both knew who called the final shots.
Because, ultimately, he chose his own company.
Two maids appeared with freshly poured glasses of lemonade swimming in mint and vodka.
Truman knew that, as per his instructions, Albert’s would be watered down.
Berty’s antics ramped up considerably when alcohol was served, a disgraceful thing that Truman didn’t tolerate or have much patience for.
But Berty had sensed something in him early on, sniffed it out of the air like a dog, and he had been one of the first people willing to partner with Truman when he was coming up from nothing.
Truman liked to consider himself loyal, at least where his business interests were concerned.
“It’s been too damn long since we’ve worked together on a film,” Berty said. He popped a handful of cashews in his mouth, some of the salt catching on his mustache. He drained his drink in one go and placed it on the edge of a fountain.
“Ah. Great minds. I was thinking the same,” Truman said.
It wasn’t a lie, exactly. Being associated with a good film, the right kind of story beloved by audiences, would only help warm attitudes toward his political career, and give him a legitimate reason to appear in his own press besides.
Albert’s hands seemed to turn the films he touched to gold.
“And I have someone in particular in mind for your next go.”
They both turned toward the pool, and Albert’s eyes came to rest on Clementine, her legs lifting into the air in a golden handstand.
When she came back up, she was dripping in water and sunlight.
Truman paused, watching her. He loved that she would get her hair wet, unlike the other starlets, who either laid out to bask in the sun or squealed when anyone came near to splashing them.