Chapter 21 #3
Her head snapped toward him. She shook it, kept shaking it, and stepped back.
“Celia, you’re safe. We’re on the same side, but this is the second time I’ve had to save your bacon, so to speak. It’s about
time you started trusting me and acting a little more intelligently.”
“Really? Really? Now you’re insulting my intelligence?” She told herself to shut up. She never talked like this to anyone,
not even people she didn’t like.
“Not at all, I’m insulting your bullheadedness. Do you not know how to be discreet?” He’d taken her elbow and was maneuvering her down the street. It was very empty, nothing but trash cans and an occasional streetlamp.
“If you’re going to break the law, you need to be a little more subtle.”
Why were there no people on the street? Where was he taking her? “Where is Mr. Kirsch? What time is it?”
“I told you; he’s paying your fine and will meet us back at the shop. And it’s almost two o’clock.”
Two? That stopped her. She had been incarcerated for hours. And suddenly, she was aware of the sour smell her clothes still
held even in the night air. Her hair straggled in her face. She’d been afraid to sit down or even move, but she still felt
dirty, unclean.
“I need a bath.”
“And you shall have one, but not until you’re fed and we talk. In here.”
They had come to the corner, and he steered her across the street to a café that appeared open.
Inside, a handful of men were hunched over steaming cups of coffee and plates of food.
A small man stood behind a narrow counter. He took down two mugs from the shelf behind him with one hand and grabbed a coffeepot
with the other, motioning with the pot for them to take a table in the corner.
“The lady needs a place to clean up,” Starling said.
“Don’t have to tell me. Stella!” he ordered. “Damn girl. Stella!” He started back just as a small face appeared from behind
the curtain covering the door to the kitchen. The face was followed by the rest of a child, rubbing her eyes.
“Show this lady to the WC, and give her a piece of soap.”
Stella looked from the man to Celia. “You come straight from Delancey Street, I bet,” she said in a deep hoarse voice that
changed Celia’s initial estimate of her age. This was no child.
“Com’n back. You don’t have any disease, do you?”
“Of course not.” Celia followed Stella down the hall, past a smoke-and-grease-saturated kitchen where a Chinese man cooked
over a decrepit cast-iron stove.
Stella stopped long enough to take a towel and piece of soap out of a wall cupboard, then showed Celia into the washroom.
Celia was relieved to see real plumbing. She availed herself of it all and returned to the front room a few minutes later,
her hair looking slightly better, her face and hands scrubbed clean, and the rest of her feeling much relieved.
Mr. Starling was sitting at the table, his mug in one hand, while he wrote in a black notebook. He shut it and returned it
to his pocket when Celia sat down.
He leaned back. “Much better. Now tell me what happened.”
“Why? Why can’t I go home? Are my sisters okay? Do they know where I am? They must be worried.”
“I imagine they know where you are by now. I can’t believe you let yourself get picked up like that. Doesn’t that Sanger woman
teach you people anything about avoiding traps?”
Suddenly wide awake, Celia just stared at him. “How do you— Who are you?”
They sat back while the old man placed two plates of eggs and bacon in front of them.
“What did they get you for? Please say it wasn’t those pessary papers.”
Celia blushed. He was so nonchalant about saying things like that out loud. She quickly looked around, but no one was interested in them.
“It was just a dirty copy of the vitamin flyer with some information for me written on the back.”
“Was any of the information incriminating?”
“No,” she snapped. “Just about how to apply to college. Camille says they need sociologists at the settlement houses. I want
to do more than sneak around delivering flyers about vitamins and”—she lowered her voice—“birth control. I mean, it’s important
but it’s so . . . small.”
When she looked up, he was smiling. “Not fulfilling your potential, eh?”
“Don’t laugh. I know a pipe dream when I see it. But it’s my pipe dream.”
“I’m not laughing, I think it’s a brilliant idea. You should be unleashed on the world. Absolutely. But you need to stay out
of jail to do it.”
“Am I going to jail?”
“Just vitamins and college information?”
She nodded.
“That’s a relief. Of course you never know with that Comstock fellow. You’ll have to appear in court.”
She shrank bank.
“Eat your eggs. Kirsch says you’ll probably get off with a fine, but I think I’ll go with you anyway.”
“You don’t know my character, and you’re not even an American.”
“But I know all the right people.” He grinned again. “Eat.”
She picked up a fork and looked dubiously at it. “Who are you exactly, and why are you doing this?”
“Haven’t you figured it out by now?”
“Some guy who’s always around but never buys anything and comes to the Arcadia to flirt with my sister.”
“Excellent. Though your sister has nothing to fear from me.”
Celia was thinking it was more the other way around, but she held her tongue.
“I think you’re probably more than an art dealer sent to buy for a private collector, but some kind of agent. At first I thought
maybe for Comstock. But—”
“God, no, I’d hoped you thought better of me than that.”
“Then what? Who are you working for?”
“I can’t tell you, not at the moment, but I will tell you something. And I hope to hell you’re not intentionally dealing in
smuggling other goods besides birth control information.”
“What—”
“You don’t have to admit it, but I’m guessing that you have something in a safe somewhere in the Arcadia. Something new. Something
that you might have discovered through no fault of your own, oh, let’s say, on a Friday night.
“I’m not interested in pursuing you, but I will if you try to sell it. So I advise you to leave it where it is. There are
people after it. Thieves. And they want it back.”
“Do you work for them?”
“God, give me patience. No.”
“Then my sisters are in danger.” She started to get up.
“Sit down and eat. You needn’t be alarmed. I have people watching the shop.”
“You have people?”
He chuckled. Shook his head as if he couldn’t believe her naivete.
“So where were they the other night in the courtyard?”
“I saved you, didn’t I?”
She begrudgingly admitted that he had. “I suppose you want us to turn ‘it’ over to you. We’ll need bona fides first.”
“Of course.” He said it seriously, but his eyes were twinkling.
She really wished he would stop that. She was bone-tired, and dirty in places that Stella’s towel and soap didn’t reach. Unbrushed
teeth and unbrushed hair, and he was making her forget she’d just been kidnapped and jailed.
“I need to go home.”
“I’ll take you, but first I need to make a few things clear.”