Chapter Twenty-Three
Not exactly enigmatic,” Kiyoko says, looking at Clarice DuBois’s advertisement in The Sun. She tosses the newspaper onto the train seat next to us. “But at least she was easy to find.”
Pax agrees. “She’s not what one would call… low profile.”
“We need her,” I say. It somehow feels odd, that I’m the one lobbying to connect with others, that I’m the one saying other humans are actually needed. I’ve spent the last year convincing myself that I need no one.
But we do. We need her. I know we need her. She’s our ticket into Max Blanck’s party.
Spirit shows me a flash of an image: a mountain lion, crouched and growling, swiping at me with its massive bloody claws.
We arrive at our stop and walk to 52 Pearl Street. And while it’s located next door to bawdy Fraunces Tavern, Clarice’s building is a gleaming gem. Kiyoko whistles long and low at its opulence.
The doorman rings Mlle DuBois’s bell, and we are given permission to take the elevator to her penthouse.
We’re greeted by a gentleman who appears to be mademoiselle’s personal assistant. He’s in a wheelchair, and his metal wheels have worn slight grooves in the wooden floors of the apartment. “Hello, William,” Pax says.
“Good to see you again, Mr. Princip,” William says. It’s very familiar, and for the first time, I wonder exactly how well Pax and Clarice know each other.
The room is all white: white walls, white furniture, white silk curtains.
Near the floor-to-ceiling window sits a gold pillared altar, with a crystal ball at the center.
Dozens of saint cards propped in cheap tin frames surround it, dozens of candles flicker and throw warm orange light across the room.
A line of crystals and tarot cards and astrology charts crowds the table.
“Can I get you anything?” William says once we’re seated on silk tufted couches. “Water? Tea? Gin? Tarot cards?” He laughs at his odd little joke and pushes his wire spectacles up his nose.
“No, thank you,” Pax says, as Kiyoko says, “Milk.”
William peers at her.
“And do you have a pet?” She peeks behind ceiling-to-floor silk drapery.
William pulls a plaid blanket farther over his legs. “No.” He wheels away.
Pax leans over me on the couch, toward Kiyoko. “We aren’t staying long.”
“Exactly. Which is why we’re getting milk while we have the chance.”
William brings Kiyoko a tall, cool, luxurious glass of milk, which she promptly hands to Nirav. He drinks it greedily. Clean milk is hard to come by, and it can be a haul to Prospect Park to get to one of the safe milk stations funded by New York’s philanthropists.
I’m delighted that Daisy sent Kiyoko our way, even if Kiyoko has heard from her no more. Or so she tells me. I shudder at the thought that Kiyoko might know my most terrible secret, that she’s simply staying with us until we have our haul.
“I’m surprised to see you again, Mr. Princip,” William says.
He watches Nirav reach toward the wooden table with his empty glass, and at the last second, William slides a coaster expertly underneath it like a shuffleboard puck.
“It takes an unusually strong person to hear no from Clarice DuBois twice.”
My interest is piqued.
Pax cracks open his luminescence, his smile filling this cold, bare room. “Well, we do have a wonderful business proposition for Mlle DuBois. We’re here to invite her to be a part of—”
“She’s not interested.”
The voice sounds like spiderwebs and smoke, and it comes from behind us. We turn.
Mlle DuBois is there, wearing a turban, a flowy silk gown, and carrying a lit cigarette in a long ivory holder.
I can tell by the smell it’s a Gitanes, a brand of particularly stinky French cigarettes.
She inhales, the tip glowing, then flicks ash on the floor dramatically. William huffs and rolls his eyes.
Pax stands and tugs at the lapels of his smart pinstriped suit jacket. Mlle DuBois offers him her hand, and his lips on the curve of her wrist makes her adjust her hips.
“Hi, Pax,” she purrs. It makes me feel… unsettled. Shaken, disturbed, like seltzer.
Why should I care? I don’t. I don’t care.
Clarice is young—far younger than I would’ve expected.
She is twenty-one, maybe twenty-two years old, but her mannerisms and dark kohl eye makeup make her appear older.
She has creamy skin, and she’s tall, and she moves like a willow in the wind, and it’s likely she’s never once had to deck a customer in the eye and make a run for it.
How in the heavens she can afford a place like this is beyond me.
Honestly, Stella.
Have you never heard of an inheritance?
Lots of money in bootlegging moonshine, there is.
Them stills print money. Her granddaddy knows his way around some corn mash.
“Mademoiselle DuBois, it’s good to see you again,” Pax says in his richest, boldest, most coffee-sounding voice. Her lips cock to match her hips, her eyes shine with sin.
“Oh, it’s my pleasure, Mr. Princip,” she says through smoke. She stresses that, now that he’s formally addressed her. “But I told you before: I’m not interested in your Bureau.”
“Ah, but you haven’t heard my latest proposition.”
Mlle DuBois flits her fingers against the tip of Pax’s nose. “Mademoiselle DuBois doesn’t need propositioning. She’s had enough of that, merci beaucoup. Mademoiselle DuBois needs…” Her eyes slide to those of us sitting on the couch, sizing us up. “… proposals.” She pouts.
Her French accent is fake. I know because Spirit shows me an image of a puppet. And if that’s fake, her gift could very well be, too.
Pax’s smile is electric. “Well, then, I propose you join us at Julia’s Bureau.” His eyes are steady on hers. He is unblinking, using all his smolder, all his powers of persuasion. “What if I told you that our new business proposal is more of a… temporary partnership?”
“Well, I’m definitely more interested in temporary.” Clarice boldly straightens Pax’s shirt. “As you know.”
From the corner of my eye, I see Kiyoko’s eyebrows shoot up. But I’m not as worried about Clarice DuBois’s innuendo as I am about that word.
Temporary.
That word hits me like a punch. It hadn’t occurred to me how temporary all these new relationships must be, now that they are based on revenge. What a fool I’ve been, getting to know these people as if they could be friends. I feel my walls re-erecting, brick by brick.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Clarice asks. “Table turning? Spiritual healing? Phrenology? Communication with the dead? Partial manifestation of body parts? Acts of levitation? Apportation? Spirit photography?”
She’s rattling off this list like a tally of groceries.
Oy vey, this one.
“Or are you after my clientele?”
That one.
Pax appears to be weighing if he can simply blurt out our plans to boost the Hope Diamond and avenge her client in the process. He opts against it: “I can offer you job security and safety.” His magnetism is wavering in the presence of this peacock.
“Pax, I’ve told you: I see anywhere between four and eleven clients a day. Three-quarters of them are women, so of very little danger to me.” Mlle DuBois clucks. “Such needy characters, most women.” Her eyes dart to me and back to Pax.
My eyes narrow at her.
“What about the other quarter of your customers, mademoiselle?” Pax asks. His smile positively shines at her. “Surely the other twenty-five percent aren’t all perfect gentlemen around the likes of you?”
The likes of her? I glance at Nirav, who cups his chin and looks at her like she’s made of spun sugar. Kiyoko isn’t even listening to this conversation; she paces the edge of the room, examining knickknacks and artifacts.
“Aren’t you a charmer?” Mlle DuBois coos. “But indeed. There are easier ways to make a buck than to expose others’ secrets. Not many folks are willing to take the chance of being run clean through with a pitchfork.”
Truth.
“Won’t you please join us?”
“I’m not easy, Monsieur Princip.”
“That’s clear to see.”
Mlle DuBois tosses her head back and laughs, her throaty chuckle rattling my nerves. She takes a drag off her cigarette and spins, sashaying down the hallway.
“I am not a no,” she says over her shoulder. Her deep voice crawls back down the hall to Pax: “I am more interested, now that you have assembled your little team. But if you want me, you’ll chase me.”
I am one of Pax’s little team? This woman makes me itchy in my own skin. I stand. “Let’s go.”
Pax blinks back the spell he’s been placed under. “I haven’t yet won.”
“I was wrong. We don’t need her,” I lie. We do.
“She doesn’t have a pet,” Kiyoko adds. “Bad sign.”
Pax sets his jaw. He hiss-whispers the next part: “She knows Blanck. She’s our ticket in.” Now he’s the one convincing us. That woman does indeed have powers of some kind.
“She shouldn’t be on the list,” I say. “Stead’s telegram? She shouldn’t be on it.” And then, I don’t know what comes over me, but I become quite petty: “I think she’s a fake.” I wince even as the words leave my lips. Me, calling someone else a fake.
Pax’s brow wrinkles, like he’s now understanding that he’s been bewitched. “Stead wouldn’t have recommended a fake. There’s been some sort of gaffe…”
William eases forward. “May I have a word?”
Pax paces the white marble floors. We have little more than two weeks until Blanck’s party, and Mlle DuBois is name enough to get our crew through his doors. Yet she insists on playing cat-and-mouse games.
William leans forward in his chair, and the leather seat squeaks. “I’m the one you want.”
Kiyoko puts down the crystal she was examining and listens. Pax leans back, sizes William up. William is beyond fastidious; not a hair is out of place, not a fleck of dust coats his glasses. He is maybe twenty-two, but his mannerisms make him seem easily forty.
“What do you bring to this game, sir?” Pax asks.
William’s nostrils flare. “You don’t think it’s a game.”
His forthrightness surprises Pax. “Go on.”
“I’m supposed to go with you,” William says. “When you said those words—Julia’s Bureau?” William’s eyes glass over with tears. He wrings the blanket in his lap.
Pax leans in. “Yes.”
“I can hear the sincerity in your voice,” William says. “This organization. It means a lot to you.”
I take a seat next to William. I try to look him in the eyes, but I can’t—it’s too intense, like sunlight reflecting off snow. My gaze falls on the intricate worn rug.
“It does,” Pax says at last. “Julia’s Bureau means the world to me. I left everything behind to become a part of it.”
What, exactly, has Pax left in his past? Who?
No. I don’t need any of those answers if this is all temporary.
“There’s a saying in Russian,” William says. “I won’t try to pronounce it—my Russian is terrible. But its literal translation is ‘The thief has a burning hat.’ It refers to someone who has an uneasy conscience. It is you.”
William’s fists clench, his jaw tight. “You’re filled with anger,” he says to Pax. “Anger is misunderstood. Many think it should be quashed, but it’s likely the most useful of emotions. What change would happen in this world if not for anger?”
He feels it, Stella.
Every bit of it.
“You’re an empath,” I say.
“I’m excellent at it, too,” he says without pretense.
The four of us—Pax, Nirav, Kiyoko, and myself—all shift eyes at one another and wonder:
Could the list have led us here for William, and not Mlle DuBois?
Pax glances sidewise at William; it’s all he can bear, really, because it’s like staring at a beating heart, fragile and gasping.
Pax is unsure. And I know why:
Is it fair to ask an empath to exact revenge?
Pax’s caution here impresses me. While he’s willing to go to seemingly any lengths to recruit that minx Clarice DuBois, he’s still maintained enough humanity to worry about corrupting William.
“I understand your hesitation,” William says. He shifts and produces a book. An appointment book, stuffed full of scraps of paper, with a worn leather cover.
“Does it help if I bring Mlle DuBois’s contacts along with me?”
“William,” Pax says, clapping his shoulder. “Welcome to Julia’s Bureau.”