Chapter 24
CHARY
Chary hadn’t ever doubted that Tjofabier Raberding didn’t love August, not really—but now he knew for certain.
He didn’t and never had. Because what on earth kind of love would exert such an awful, dehumanizing experience upon someone?
What kind of man could do it? Make a man crawl out from under arrest, violence, and threat of imprisonment, so that he could be rescued by only him?
Isolate a man so that he had only him to whom to turn?
“You will take your hands off me, please,” Chary said to Raberding, as soon as they were down the station steps and onto the wet sidewalk. The Mulberry Street crowds were subdued this morning, for there was a steady, audible rain coming down. “This has been quite enough show.”
“But you can hardly stand,” Raberding soothed. He shook open an umbrella. He did not let go.
“Then I’ll fall.”
Raberding considered him pityingly, like he might a stubborn child. “I can’t allow that. August would want his brother looked out for.” He squeezed, painfully hard. “Here I am.”
“Yes. I do understand why it is you’re here.”
Raberding ignored this. “Here’s the auto.” He pulled Chary over to an all-gold motorcar, glass-enclosed, possibly a Pierce. What on earth had August seen in this man? Not his taste in automobiles.
The chauffeur opened the back. Chary resisted with both heels, but it was difficult; the shoes he’d been given in the station were too loose, and slippery in the wet. “Making me your hostage won’t do a thing.”
Raberding’s hand on his back stopped just short of an actual shove. He put the umbrella between them and the chauffeur. “The Chief Inspector committed you to me,” he hissed. “You’re bought and paid for. Get in the car. Or do you want to be back behind white bars?”
“Chary!”
Laurie’s voice, harsh and cracking. Chary looked up over the motorcar door. Laurie stood on the sidewalk in front of the station, next to a short, slim man with a long blond mustache and a big bowtie. Sam Sullivan “Steamship” Warren, Laurie’s editor. Chary recognized him from his picture byline.
Chary didn’t know what to do. Smile, wave, cry out? It felt like all he had left in him was weariness—perhaps the barest smidge of self-preservation—and neither of those applied to how he felt for Laurie, which was at the moment primarily shame.
In the end, he did nothing but stare numbly. Laurie stepped forward—he had a limp—
Raberding put a hand on Chary’s shoulder to force him into the motorcar. “By the by,” he whispered, “I carry a pistol on my person.”
Chary went.
This Pierce had a door to the right side only; Raberding slid in beside him. “Fucking drive,” he demanded of the chauffeur through the glass partition, then pulled down every shade around them.
Once the auto had lurched forward, engine pistoning, he turned to Chary.
“See, now,” he said loudly, his accent pitching bright like he shouted down the radio, “not even an hour drive, and then food and rest… I have a very nice guest apartment adjacent my own at the Ansonia. A return to luxury will have you see reason again.”
Chary said nothing. He put his head on the window, then winced. He’d forgotten about his face. Raberding rattled on: “A friendship between us is natural, wouldn’t you think, given our upcoming business partnership?”
Propositions were absurd when said at a decibel of a near-shout. They ought to have been a silken whisper. Chary’s head hurt like one pulsing blister, red-hot, ready to burst.
“But…” He chose his words carefully: “I am nothing like August.” Not handsome, to begin with.
Raberding looked astonished. “Why would that matter?” He put a hand, stacked with gold rings, on Chary’s knee.
“But you two brothers are old hands at taking the other’s place.
Aren’t you?” He clamped hard. “I suppose it wasn’t a total exchange.
Suppose we’ll see if you won’t take to whoring. Won’t we?”
Oh, Lord. Chary closed his eyes. Threats aside...
had August told Tjofabier Raberding absolutely everything?
Or was August’s true identity something Raberding had learned since his presumed death?
Either way, it was very bad. If they were exposed as playing the other, it would be fraud and worse.
If Raberding was waiting to greenlight that story—if he had a reporter ready and waiting to print it…
Not journalist Laurie Tulley, though. Chary knew that now without a doubt.
This was something Laurie simply couldn’t have known, because if he had known it, he’d never, ever have looked at Chary in the same fond way he did now.
Laurie had sympathy for Chary the queer, disinherited eldest—not the twenty-four-year-old rich boy with a glassblowing hobby.
Not Chary the inheritor, who by being born had usurped his brother.
“… you won’t be an invert anymore. Understood?”
“I beg your pardon?” While Chary had disassociated, Raberding had been speaking. Hurting Chary’s knee again, gripping and rubbing.
“An invert. You’re cleared of being one. Those were merely despicable rumors begun years ago by your dear departed brother. He wanted to keep everything from you unlawfully.”
“I’ve just been arrested for actual sodomy—”
“Keep your voice down. And no, you haven’t. The Chief Inspector has erased everything,” he said smugly. “Last night never happened.”
Chary sat up straighter. “Except that it did happen. I would rather be Wilde than to have it never have happened, and made so by you.”
Raberding turned heated eyes upon him. “Your British schooling comes out when you’re angered. It must be you that speaks French properly.”
“Who,” Chary said wearily. Raberding didn’t notice.
“And Latin?” he pressed.
“Strictly speaking, no one speaks—”
Raberding leaned in. Chary had thought he was too tired to recoil; it turned out he wasn’t. “Greek?” he breathed.
Ancient or modern? It didn’t matter. He didn’t speak either. “Ah… no. Er—I may pass out.”
“No, you won’t—” The man seemed to change his mind, eyes narrowing. Chary couldn’t especially tell: fuzzy black apparitions were encroaching at the corners. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Fine.” Raberding pulled him sideways.
Tjofabier Raberding’s thigh was marginally softer than the window. He wore cologne, and it was godawful.
“I don’t wish you any harm, you know,” Raberding said, soft as he could and still be audible; the car had changed gear. He pushed Chary’s hair back—like Laurie had in the Berryfield house, except not quite. “You’re the one I was supposed to meet. The true heir. Not the whore.”
Chary’s dizzied chills turned full-body. “But you want August.”
Raberding sighed. “Unfortunat—”
He didn’t finish. Chary was weightless, tumbling out of Raberding’s grip, then suddenly lying on his back on the car-cab floor, looking straight up at the leather roof, his legs pretzeled into each other.
He tried to figure out what had happened, exactly; surely, he was too tall to fit there.
The car had been stopped, too fast, all at once, surely before they’d meant to.
This wasn’t the Upper West Side. Had they hit something?
“Good God.” Raberding flopped back into the seat, clutching his head and out-of-place hair, his expression dazed.
There was a distinct swelling between his eyes.
Chary thought he might have been jerked face-forward into the partition glass and bounced back again; there was an awfully familiar spiderwebbed pattern in the clear plate. “What happened? Chauffeur. Chauffeur!”
Despite himself, Chary wheezed with laughter. Don’t you know his name? “Now it’s come around to you.”
Raberding looked down. “What?” he said, then repeated, “What?”
The door opened. It was not the chauffeur.
It was August, hatless, hair down, clean-shaven, an upside-down avenging angel in chauffeur’s double-breasted livery.
With him came rain-damp industrial smoke, burnt gas, the smell of the East River.
Not even close to the Upper West Side. With the shades shut, Raberding hadn’t bothered to check that the chauffeur had been heading where he’d meant to be.
Chary pulled himself up onto the seat. “August! He’s got a gun!”
August didn’t hear him or didn’t care. “You don’t touch my brother,” he snarled.
Tjofabier Raberding screamed as he was pulled out of the car and into the rain.
Midmorning at the docks and just past shift change; no passersby turned around at the noise.
It wouldn’t have mattered if they had, anyway; August was not alone.
Four large, rough-looking men flanked him—specters from his past—as well as the banged-up Mr. Sumner.
Looming behind were the smokestacks of the glassworks, white lettering, East 9th and Avenue D.
August dumped his former lover against the chain-link fencing. It rattled down the length, throwing raindrops.
Chary winced. He wished they were on the opposite side of the city. As it was, he could only clutch a lamppost and hope August wouldn’t lose his head entirely. “August, is this wise?”
“August,” Raberding gasped, “my love, you’re alive—”
“Don’t pretend, Tjo.” August removed his chauffeur’s jacket and yanked at his tie.
Raberding recoiled farther. “What are you— What did you do to my chauffeur?”
“I paid him more than you. Capitalism, hmm?” He rolled up shirtsleeves.
This act had some significance to Raberding; his eyes widened, then narrowed. “Oh, please. You wouldn’t.”
It was more plea than denial. August shrugged and indicated the roughs. “But they might. I’ve fucked all of them, you know. Maybe they are jealous, Tjo. Maybe they are unreasonably fond of me. Maybe they can’t help themselves. Could you imagine that?”
Raberding eyeballed the men. “I knew you were a whore. Not involved with the gangs!”
August laughed. “Did you think that meant I was an island, lonely and conquerable? Who owns the brothels? Who owned me, long before you arrived there?” To his friends he said, “Make sure he isn’t armed.”