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While Mabel was distracted with gathering her belongings, Evie pocketed Arthur’s card.
By the time Evie and Mabel arrived on Carmine Street, it was dusk. Street lamps cast a sickly glow down the block.
“This is it,” Mabel said, hopping up the steps to Maria’s building and knocking at the door. An older man answered. He squinted suspiciously at Evie and Mabel. “There’s no booze here. This is not a speakeasy.”
“I’m looking for Maria Provenza? She lives in Four-L,” Mabel explained, and smiled, hoping it would make them seem like trustworthy souls, but it only made the man scowl harder.
“Those people? They’re gone, and good riddance.” He spat over the railing.
“What… what do you mean, gone?” Mabel sputtered.
“Deported,” the man said slowly.
“For what?” Evie asked.
“Treason, that’s what! Galleanists, the whole bunch of ’em. The police found all sorts of anarchist papers—seditious materials—up there in that dump they were all packed into. Foreigners. Send ’em all back, I say.” He pointed a finger at the girls. “You girls oughta steer clear of that nonsense. Go home to your families.”
He disappeared inside, slamming the door in their faces.
“But I was there. That’s not true. They had no seditious papers,” Mabel said numbly to Evie as they walked arm in arm back up the mostly deserted Carmine Street. “They were people just trying to get by, selling paper roses on the streets. Someone wanted them gone.”
“The Shadow Men,” Evie said, and Mabel nodded.
Night was coming down hard now. Evie shivered. “Remember when we were just scared of getting pinched by the cops for getting blotto at the Hotsy Totsy?”
“Or being lectured by my mother for sneaking out my window?”
“Mabel, daahrling, I did not raise you to behave like a common hoooligan!” Evie said in her best impression of Mabel’s mother. They shared a giggle, but it was short-lived. “Sometimes, I wish we were girls again, safe.”
Mabel snorted in contempt. “When has it ever been safe to be a girl?”
The train rumbled over the tracks above Sixth Avenue.
“I have to meet up with Arthur,” Mabel said.
“Can’t I tag along? I want to meet this mysterious Arthur Brown!”
“Sorry. I can’t. Rules. You’re not even supposed to know. Remember?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t stay. I just want to lay eyes on the revolutionary specimen.” Evie wiggled her eyebrows and giggled.
“I’d better not. He might get upset,” Mabel said.
Evie sobered. “Well, that doesn’t sound kosher, as your father would say.”
Immediately, Mabel got defensive. “You don’t know him like I do. He’s got his reasons to be careful.”
Evie knew Mabel. She knew that telling Mabel not to do something was as good as pushing her toward it. She was stubborn that way—and too much of a romantic. No doubt she’d see Arthur as a wounded boy who needed her love to become a healed man. Sewn into Mabel’s goodness was a twin thread of grandiosity: Saving people gave Mabel the feeling that she was special for doing so. It was Mabel’s drug, and she was very addicted. Not that Evie cared if that was Mabel’s blind spot. After all, everybody had something about them that could be lovely on the one hand and annoying as hell on the other. And anyway, it was clear that there was no arguing it tonight.
Evie threw her hands in the air in defeat. “All right. I can’t fight the great reformer Mabel Rose.” She kissed Mabel’s
cheek. “Fare thee well, sweet Pie Face.”
Mabel waved good-bye and turned up Bleecker Street.
“Mabesie!” Evie called.
Mabel turned back. Under the glow of the street lamp, she looked like a sweet-faced angel. “Yes?”
