Iron Cast (45 page)

The day was dawning when the last of the patrons finally weaved their way out of the Cast Iron. Corinne left Ada backstage, where she was trying to convince Charlie to go home and get some sleep. Corinne figured the kind of convincing that Ada really wanted to do warranted some privacy. She made her way to the back of the bar and through the storage room. Gordon's chair was still there, in the corner. The police had found him dead in his apartment, his cat curled up next to him. As far as Corinne knew, they were charging Jackson with the murder. On the chair, the vigil candle that Charlie had lit the day before had gone out.

Corinne went out the back door, hoping to cool down. When she found Gabriel leaning against the wall and smoking a cigarette, she couldn't even manage to be surprised. If she didn't think about it too hard, she could pretend it was still a week ago, when there had been nothing but possibilities between them.

She pressed her shoulder blades against the wall beside him, letting her fingertips rest against the icy brick. Wordlessly, he offered her the cigarette. She shook her head.

“You catch the show?” she asked when she could no longer stand the silence.

“No.”

“Still got a problem with what we do here?”

“My mother bought a new table. She needed help moving it up the stairs.”

A laugh escaped Corinne at the absurd simplicity of the
statement. She jammed her knuckles against her lips and glanced sideways at Gabriel. He was smiling. She liked the way it softened the angular planes of his face. She found herself wishing he smiled more often.

“Ada invited me,” he said, staring hard at the cigarette between his fingers. A thin rivulet of smoke drifted skyward, melting into the sunlight above the alley.

“Ada thinks she's awfully clever.”

“She also told me what you did for me—what you told the councilman.”

Corinne swallowed. She could feel him looking at her now, and even though she steeled herself, the dark of his eyes still made her heart skip a beat when she met his gaze.

“You helped us save Saint,” she said. “I thought that was worth a token effort on my part. If they deport you anyway, don't expect me to do anything about it.”

She was pleased at how resolved she sounded. She almost believed herself.

Gabriel looked straight ahead again and took a pull from his cigarette. When he released the smoke, it sounded like a sigh. Corinne drove her fingertips into the wall, letting the brick abrade her skin. She told herself to go back inside, but of course she didn't listen.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

As usual, Gabriel didn't reply, with assent or otherwise. He did look at her again.

“That first show you attended,” she said. “What memory did you have while Ada was playing? What made you leave?”

He had told her it was the happiness. When Ada played childhood bliss, Corinne remembered the hot summer days on
the beach on Martha's Vineyard and the cold winter nights in her grandfather's study, listening to him tell the stories of his travels.

A frown etched itself between Gabriel's eyebrows. “My seventh birthday,” he said. “My mother made an apple cake. My father brought home
petushok
candies—lollipops shaped like roosters. They were my favorite when I was a kid.”

Gabriel seemed to have forgotten about the lit cigarette, which was burning perilously close to his fingers. He was staring ahead, his eyes locked on the middle distance.

“It was a couple of weeks before my father was killed, but in my head it all blurs together. Somehow while my mother is lighting the candles, she's sobbing about my father's death. And while my father and I eat the candy, the kitchen is filled with the mourners from his funeral.”

His hand jerked, and he dropped the cigarette. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, turning his face upward to catch a ray of the sun. Corinne looked down to see that their little fingers were almost touching on the wall. She lifted her hand, hesitated, then fit her fingers between his. His knuckles were cool and chapped beneath her palm. When she looked up again, his eyes were on her.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I could show you how to resist hemopaths—if you decided to stay, that is.”

“Do I look like I'm going anywhere?” he asked.

“Did you mean what you said at the warehouse?” The question escaped her before she could second-guess it. “About me?”

His lips quirked.

“Shouldn't you know? You're the one who told me I was a bad liar.”

“I lied.”

“I meant what I said.”

More than anything, she wanted to kiss him. He was so bright and beautiful and vulnerable in the daylight. But she couldn't let herself. No matter the reasons, he had sold them out to the HPA and now Madeline was dead. She couldn't forgive that, not yet. Maybe not ever.

“I'm sorry,” she said again, though she wasn't sure why. She pulled her hand away from his. “You should go home. It's getting late—or early, I guess.”

He kept her gaze for a long second, then nodded and straightened. “If you need me—”

“I know where you live now,” Corinne said.

Gabriel smiled barely and nodded.

“Hold on,” Corinne said. She reached into the breast pocket of his coat, where she knew he kept his matchbook. “I do need these.”

For the space of a breath, while they were inches apart and her hand was so close to his heart she could feel it beating, she thought about forgetting everything that was between them and telling him the truth. That she couldn't remember what her life was like before he had come into it, and she was having a hard time imagining what it would be like if he were gone.

She curled her fingers around the matchbook and stepped back.

“You're not armed,” she said, trying to clear her head.

“I am, actually. Switched to an iron-free piece.”

“Damn, you're getting more inconspicuous.”

“Thanks.”

Corinne closed her fist over the matches and opened the back door. The familiar scent of old wood and alcohol reached her nose. She breathed it in with relish.

“Cor, wait,” said Gabriel.

She turned to face him. His hands were shoved into his pockets, and the frown line had reappeared between his eyebrows.

“I know I might not ever make things right.” His eyes dropped briefly, and he sucked in a short breath before looking up again. “But I hope you'll let me try.”

Corinne tried to think of something to say, something witty or honest or
anything.
But words wouldn't come, and Gabriel left the alley. She watched him go. When he stepped out from between the two buildings, the sunlight turned him briefly golden. Then he turned the corner and was gone.

Ada was waiting for Corinne in the storage room. She'd finally managed to send Charlie home, after one last kiss in the dazzling sunlight, just outside the front door. His years playing French horn translated to a host of other skills involving his mouth—French and otherwise. It still barely distracted her from the letter that was folded in her pocket. She'd found it shoved under the Cast Iron's front door the morning before. The script was her mother's handwriting, and at first she thought Nyah had left it on her way to the train station, but it wasn't a farewell letter.

In Portuguese, her mother told her again how much she loved her, and how much she wanted her to be safe. Then she wrote that she was staying in a hotel for now, but she was not buying a train ticket to the Midwest. She wasn't leaving at all.

I will not leave my family behind,
she wrote.
I said nothing when you were here before, because I knew you would be too stubborn to listen. It is my own fault. You are your mother's daughter.

Ada had cried through the rest of the letter, her tears spotting the ink. She couldn't stop thinking about the story of the beautiful
queen and her prince from a faraway land. Maybe her mother was right. A turn in the tale wasn't the end.

Ada had wanted to see her mother right away, but she needed to wait until they'd closed everything up. Corinne looked small and worn when she came in from the alley—a far cry from the force of nature she had been all night, sailing through Dante and Rossetti and Tennyson without dropping a single syllable. Her hair had lost its curl, and some of the jet beads on her champagne-colored dress were missing.

“Is everyone gone?” she asked, locking the door behind her.

Ada nodded. “Saint's still at the bar. James is sleeping in the basement.”

“Good.” Corinne gave her a once-over and smiled. “Your lipstick's smudged.”

“Can't imagine how that happened,” Ada said airily.

Corinne laughed, but the sound was forced. She opened her hand to reveal a book of matches. Ada watched as she lit the candle on Gordon's chair. They stood in silence for almost a minute, watching the bright flame sway. Finally Corinne pocketed the matchbook, and they went upstairs together.

Ada had told Danny not to bother cleaning up that morning, and the tables were covered with glasses and plates and cigarette butts. The hardwood floor was spotted with spilled drinks and dropped appetizers. Saint was behind the bar, wetting a rag. He glanced up at them when they entered but said nothing.

Corinne sat on a stool at the corner of the bar, nearest the back door, and laid her head down on her arms. Ada picked absently at the buttons on her coat. Exhaustion crept over her, but she didn't want to sit down. “We should probably go downstairs and get some sleep,” she said.

Corinne didn't move. Saint, who was wiping down the bar at the opposite end, looked at her again but didn't reply. She couldn't blame them. They had gone to the basement only once, two nights before. Knowing that Pierce and Wilkey had been down there, sifting through the lives they had built, was a violation that Ada couldn't stand to think about. Johnny's office had been mostly emptied out. The entire contents of her and Corinne's bedroom were in a heap on the floor, and all the decorations on their walls—the newspaper clippings and swatches of wallpaper and silken scarves—had been torn down. She'd seen her violin on top of the pile. The case had been opened and one of the strings had snapped, but otherwise, it appeared unharmed. It was still the most beautiful object she had ever touched. The only companion more constant than Corinne. But Johnny had given it to her. It was a remnant of a life she hadn't meant to live. She left it where it was.

Ada had peeked into Saint's room, where he was sitting on his cot, arms on his knees. He had raised his soft gray eyes to her, and the bleakness there wrenched Ada's heart. All his paintings were gone. She had gathered blankets from a storage closet, and the three of them had slept on the stage, spending half the night in whispers.

Ada turned around, taking in the Cast Iron's disarray. Even though hours ago it had been packed with laughter and clinking glasses and swinging music, it felt emptier than it ever had before. She tried not to think about what had been lost, about Madeline by the waterfront, about Johnny in the warehouse.

“It feels smaller than it used to,” Saint said. He wasn't looking at either of them, or at the scattered tables and chairs, or at the last of his paintings mounted on the wall. He just kept pushing the rag across the bar in methodical motion.

Ada glanced back at Corinne, who had straightened up on her stool. She seemed to know exactly what Ada was thinking. As always.

“For each age is a dream that is dying,

Or one that is coming to birth.”

Instantly the lights dimmed and changed—no longer strings of electric bulbs but flaming sconces along the walls and glimmering candles on the tables. The tablecloths were gone, the furniture rearranged. Instead of a dance floor there were more tables, spaced between oaken pillars. Ada could see the first-ever patrons of the Cast Iron like faded ghosts in the candlelight, men in waistcoats and knee breeches, some with powdered wigs and polished buckles on their shoes. They leaned close over their mugs of ale, eyes bright with the talk of revolution. Ada moved forward into the scene, transfixed by the intricacy of the illusion all around her. The years passed by like a rushing wind, and the patrons flashed in and out of focus, a parade of changing fashions and evolving ideals.

Revolutionaries and poets. Intellectuals and industrialists. Soldiers and politicians. The Cast Iron had hosted them all throughout the decades, reg and hemopath alike.

Seeing all that had come before made Ada realize how far the Cast Iron had fallen.

“Touching.” Johnny's voice, somehow both achingly familiar and terrifyingly strange in the midst of the shifting apparitions, made Ada whirl.

The illusion fell away, and she saw Johnny standing in the doorway of the storage room. Corinne saw him too, but before she could move, he lunged forward and dragged her off the stool.
Ada ran forward, and Corinne cried out in pain, but she quieted abruptly. Johnny held her tight in front of him, his knife against her neck. Ada froze.

“If you even think about singing, I'll cut her throat,” Johnny said.

He was in the same clothes he'd worn in the warehouse, unkempt, eyes bloodshot. Corinne made a cursory attempt at struggling but winced as Johnny pressed the blade harder against her skin. In her gauzy party dress, with her gold headache band askew, she looked like a porcelain doll in his hands. She looked helpless.

Ada tried to breathe. After Haversham and the sunrise by the waterfront, drenched in Madeline's blood, Ada had thought that nothing could scare her. But as she stared at the knife against Corinne's neck, there was terror burning in her veins. For a few moments the only sounds in the club were Johnny's jagged breathing and Corinne's short gasps.

“If you kill her,” Ada said slowly, “you'll be unconscious before she hits the ground. I only need a few bars. You know that.”