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With a growl, the big Shadow Man reached for one of the Project Buffalo papers.
“Viola!” Sister Walker cried. “Viola, now!”
The crow zoomed down from the window ledge and bit the man’s fingers.
“Ow! Goddamned crazy bird!” he said, shaking out his injured hand.
“You’ll live. Put some iodine on it,” Jefferson scolded as he gathered the fallen files.
“Easy for you to say,” Adams said, sullen.
The crow dove down again and snapped up one of the sheets of paper in its beak just before the Shadow Man chased it away with a loud, “Shoo! Or I’ll wring your neck.” It hopped onto a newel post and blinked at Sister Walker.
“You know what to do,” Margaret whispered as Adams retrieved the scattered files. “Keep them safe.”
“Talking to birds, Margaret?” Jefferson tsked.
“It’s Miss Walker to you,” she said, and then she sat down so that they were forced to drag, then carry her to their waiting sedan. As they did, she looked into the eyes of her neighbors. “Make sure you tell it how you see it. Don’t let them murder me and get away with it like they did Will Fitzgerald.”
The Shadow Man forced Sister Walker into the backseat of the sedan and locked the door. He turned to the witnesses. “This woman is wanted for the murder of William Fitzgerald, and for treason against the United States of America.”
Some on the street looked away, convinced. But others showed doubt.
The bird was al
so a witness. With a great flapping of its mighty wings, it flew away, the paper still clutched in its beak. It soared above the rooftops of Harlem’s Jazz Age magnificence, swooping over Miss A’lelia Walker’s mansion, where inside Langston Hughes hobnobbed with the editors of the Crisis, who listened to Duke Ellington play and rolled their eyes at Carl Van Vechten. It flew above the neon sky of Times Square, where the city was already preparing for tomorrow night’s Sarah Snow memorial, and then all the way downtown to Newspaper Row, near City Hall, where the crow came to rest on the front steps of the New York Daily News building. It waited until a door was opened, and then it flew past the startled heads of reporters—“Hey, now!”—who were filing stories for tomorrow’s paper. The bird hopped onto the desk of T. S. Woodhouse, where it deposited the file at last.
“You got a visitor, Woody,” one of the reporters said with a laugh. “Maybe it’s come to collect for your bookie.”
Woody tried not to let his reaction to the barb show on his face. And then, as he read through the file on his desk with trembling hands, he tried not to let that show, too.
NIGHT OF THE GHOSTS
Night steals into New York City carefully at first, then falls hard and fast. City neon shows off its shine, hazing the sky with man-made stardust. Street lamps burn. Amber eyes glow in the skyscrapers. Tugboats turn on their navigation lights. And one lady in the harbor hoists a torch. People need light in the dark. They think it will keep them safe from the things hidden there.
In the Russian Baths on East Tenth Street, paunchy old men gather in the basement steam room for a shvitz. It is said that gangsters come to the back rooms to trade secrets while deaf masseurs beat their broad backs with oak branches and hear nothing. Eight blocks south is Marble Cemetery, one of the city’s oldest graveyards. Records list the reasons for burial: Puerperal fever. Consumption. Dropsy. Aneurism. Hepatitis. Exhaustion. Croup. Broken heart.
So many ways to die.
The basement is a hot cloud. Steam hisses and curls in the corners. Mr. Lubetzky can barely make out the silhouette of his friend Mr. Adleman. Mr. Lubetzky is a million miles away. He’s remembering the village he left behind many years ago.
It’s too much—the heat and the memory. “Samuel. Let’s go for the plunge,” Mr. Lubetzky says, easing his aching bones from the wooden seat. He tugs on the door, which will not open. The old man’s heart begins to race. He yells for the attendant, first in English, then in Russian. From somewhere in all that steam comes a growl, low and menacing, like a dog gnawing possessively at a bone.
“Samuel?” Mr. Lubetzky calls.
A shape rises in the haze, still growling, and the old man imagines it wearing the Cossack’s uniform—some wicked dybbuk who has followed across the great, vast sea to hurt him in this new world. “Hungry,” it gurgles and opens its jaw.
A private party. The Casino restaurant in the heart of Central Park. The swells huddle at elegant tables while their chauffeurs stand at the back of the dining room, ready to run out for the bottles of champagne stashed away in parked Studebakers and Duesenbergs. It isn’t the dazzling lights of the Casino but the hope of finding stale food in the bins behind the restaurant that draws Oscar Winslow from his sleeping spot on a park bench. Poor Oscar, who fought in the war but came back with a permanent tremor that made factory work impossible. Oscar turned to morphine for the shaking hands and the night terrors, and now he lives in the park, surviving on scraps and the sympathy of strangers.
A rustling draws Oscar’s attention away from the stale bread in the rubbish bin. It’s coming from the dark thicket across the lawn. Oscar thinks of the eerie calm that would descend on the trenches just before hell came down in cannon fire and mustard gas. “A-anybody th-there?” Oscar is surprised by the sound of his own voice. He hasn’t spoken to another soul in days.
On the other side of the bright windows, the bandleader sings a jazzed-up Irving Berlin tune for all he’s worth:
“I had a dream, last night,
That filled me full of fright:
I dreamt that I was with the Devil, below.”
