Chapter2 - 4

Nora stated.

A sticky pause. “Have you been following the Rosenberg case?”

her mother asked brightly. You have to give her credit for persistence , Nora thought. “They say the grand jury will hand down indictments after the new year.”

“Mam, I have to go.”

“That man is guilty, you can see it in his face. Russian Jews can’t be trusted, everyone knows that. The wife, though, what kind of woman is involved in spy rings ? Women don’t do things like that, even Jewesses. What this world is coming to, spy rings and the atom bomb and Reds—”

Nora flattened herself against the wall as a stream of her housemates flooded down the corridor: Claire with blouse untucked and red curls flying, headed for her senator’s office; Fliss annoyingly perky and bright-eyed for eight in the morning, clicking off for the park with cooing baby in baby carriage... And Pete with his schoolbag, tugging Lina along, stopping to give Nora an elaborate bow with an imaginary feathered hat. (Pete was still on Dumas, bless him— The Count of Monte Cristo .) “Mam, I’m hanging up—”

“If you’re not coming for Christmas, could you pop a little something in the mail?”

Nora’s mother dropped her voice. “Your brother came up a bit short this month. He has to contribute to so many police charities. And the children need new shoes—”

“Tim already nicked my month’s rent right out of my wallet,”

Nora cut her off. “Though I doubt it went to any widows or orphans.”

“You’d deny your own brother?”

The hot, protective flare of the Walsh family temper. They all had it, women included. “He’s family. It’s your Christian duty.”

How often had Nora heard that? He’s your brother. He’s family. It’s your Christian duty. And then—

“You don’t need rent, anyway, Nora love. A girl shouldn’t be living on her own before she’s married, not when she has a loving family. Just come home where you belong.”

Nora closed her eyes tight. And hung up.

Mr.Harris kept his office so overheated, Nora headed outside the moment noon rolled around. “Are you quite all right, MissWalsh?”

Mr.Harris called out absently as she took her leave. “You seem distracted.”

“Fine, Mr.Harris,”

Nora reassured. Just wondering what to do when a gangster comes to pick me up from work this evening —only to see Xavier already standing outside the staff entrance, cigarette between two fingers, hat brim slashing across his forehead, and overcoat stirring around his knees in the cold breeze. “You said you were coming tonight,”

she ended up saying.

“Couldn’t wait.”

He admired her up and down, from French twist to the hem of her soft chocolate-brown worsted suit. “You’re a sight. I like your waitress uniform fine, but dudded up like this you’re a long cool drink of water.”

Nora touched the high collar of her cream silk blouse, which she’d snatched off the hanger that morning because it would hide the marks he’d put on her neck last night.

He went on, nodding up at the big pillared edifice behind her. “All you’ve told me about this place, and I’ve never been. It occurred to me, I keep asking you to dinner, asking you to the cottage, trying to walk you into my world. Why don’t you walk me into yours, MissWalsh? Where do you go to lunch every day?”

Cut him off and go back inside , Nora thought. But she was already answering. “You might be disappointed, Mr.Byrne. Usually I take five minutes eating a sandwich sitting out on the steps here, and then I visit the Rotunda.”

He flicked his cigarette butt away. “Show me?”

Xavier’s polished oxfords made no sound at all on the marble floor when they entered the round, hushed space of the Rotunda: the coffered ceiling arching above, the massive pillars, the two vast murals rippling across the walls. “That’s John Hancock hearing Jefferson report the Declaration of Independence,”

Nora said, nodding to the bewigged men painted along the northwest wall. “And on the northeast side there is James Madison submitting the Constitution to George Washington.”

“Read about them in school.”

Xavier strolled along, head tilted back to look at the painted figures. They had the Rotunda almost entirely to themselves; everyone else in the District seemed to be out Christmas shopping this afternoon rather than sightseeing. “They didn’t interest me much. Didn’t have much to do with me.”

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong.”

Cuban heels clicking, Nora led him to the display case at the Rotunda’s apex. Just a single, fading piece of parchment with its proud header: Bill of Rights . “There’s talk that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will be brought from the Library of Congress and displayed here too,”

Nora said, feeling the rush of excitement that always warmed her whenever she helped draft a memo on the matter. “New cases, helium-filled to preserve the parchment...”

“They’re dusty old pieces of paper,”

Xavier said. “Why get excited about that?”

But his voice was curious rather than dismissive.

“They aren’t just dusty old pieces of paper. They’re the only things Americans have in common as a people. We come from everywhere—”

Thinking of Jewish Mr.Rosenberg at the deli; of Swedish-named Pete Nilsson and old Reka Muller with her Hungarian epithets; of the dark-skinned drummer and bassist who played with Joe Reiss; of her own big Irish clan. “Our people all spoke different languages and maybe still do; we look different; we live in every possible location from cities to towns, mountains to plains. But”—she waved at the Bill of Rights, including its sister documents off in the Library of Congress—“this unites us. A government established for an articulated principle, not tribal allegiances or lines drawn on a map.”

“Has it made us any better?”

Xavier’s eyes were intent. “We’re the ones who got ourselves an atom bomb and dropped it—twice.”

“You were a marine. I’d have thought you agreed with that decision.”

“I did,”

he acknowledged. “Doesn’t mean it feels good now, living in a world where a push of a button could end things in one big mushroom cloud. Hard not to wonder if we took a wrong turn somewhere along the line. If we could have done better.”

“We can always do better,”

Nora said. “These papers acknowledged from the beginning that we weren’t good enough yet. ‘A more perfect union’—it’s right there in our foundations that we aren’t perfect, that we have more to strive for.”

She grinned. “I know, I know. I sound preachy. But isn’t it fascinating, when you really think about it? Most kingdoms or nations just say, ‘we rule because we’re strongest’ or ‘we rule because a god threw a thunderbolt and willed it so.’ We’re the country who said, ‘Here we are; let’s live by these principles and keep getting better at living up to them.’”

Xavier cocked his head. “Why did you get so interested in all this?”

“Two reasons... First, just luck. I landed here in the steno pool at eighteen”—Nora turned a circle in the big space, drinking it in—“and I wanted to know everything about the place, what it stood for. So I kept asking questions, reading books from the library, pulling public documents out of the archives...”

Usually Nora noticed people start to yawn when she began rattling on about the importance of archival preservation and historical documents. Or they thought she was being funny: Look at you, MissPatriotic! She’d never quite been able to explain that patriotism should be more than just a simple wave of the flag without thought behind it. Her pride in this building, being part of it with everything it protected—it was all wrapped up in hope, not complacency. Hope, and a dose of shame: Look at me, a girl with some bad things in her past, but she got past them. Bettered herself, so she could be part of something bigger than herself. So she could live up to something more.

The nation could do the same. It was 1950, the beginning of a new decade. She hoped it would.

“You said there were two reasons you got interested in all this.”

Xavier was still watching her. “What’s the other?”

The harder reason. Nora found herself examining the faux-pearl button on her cuff. “My family,”

she said quietly. “Beat cops for four generations, backbone of the precinct. My dad even made detective. And so many of them stand for nothing . So many of them just scratch each other’s back, cover up for each other, play the game. Not all of them—”

Nora knew there were good cops; she could even tell you which ones in her family they were: generally, the ones who didn’t get promoted. “But there are so many on the take, the good ones often as not find their hands tied.”

She gulped a breath. “When I was little, I eavesdropped on my grandfather getting drunk with a crony late one night, and they were reminiscing about burying something out at a construction site. I was too young to realize they were talking about a body . I don’t know where, I don’t know who. I wish I remembered enough to do something, but I don’t. I just remember them talking about how hard it had been, and what a relief nothing ever rebounded on the department.”

She looked up at Xavier and saw absolutely no surprise. “My family are all police blue, but so many of them are crooks. They stand for the law—the law that needs good police—and so many of them wink at it. I wanted to find something that wasn’t...”

“Crooked,”

said Xavier.

She lifted a shoulder, smiled too brightly. He took her arm as they walked another circuit of the Rotunda, and she nodded to the guard on duty.

“So that’s your world,”

Xavier said as they strolled out. “This place.”

“I love it.”

Nora trailed her fingertips along a bit of marble scrollwork along the wall. “Someday, maybe, I could be promoted to chief of Building and Grounds... my boss already says I know as much about the place as men who have worked here for a decade. They’ve never appointed a woman to the position but who knows? Let’s go out the Penn Ave. entrance,”

she added, directing them. “It’s the research entrance, but they’ll let you through with me. There are four allegorical statues by the entrances—on the Constitution Avenue side the statues are Heritage and Guardianship . I like the ones on this side better.”

They walked out slowly into the winter afternoon between Future and Past . Xavier stopped to look up at Future as she loomed over the passersby: a young woman in carved limestone, gazing outward over a blank book where the future had yet to be written. “I got a place there?”

Xavier asked Nora, pointing at the book. “In yours?”

That hook twisted in Nora’s gut again. No , she knew she should say. What she said was “Perhaps.”

“I took a walk in your world,”

he said, extending a hand. “Come walk in mine.”

The night nearly began with a disagreement. “I can’t take that from you,”

Nora protested weakly in the front hall of Briarwood House.

“So throw it in a gutter if you want. I like to give you things. What you do with them is up to you.”

Xavier draped the chinchilla wrap around Nora’s shoulders and she couldn’t help rubbing the sumptuous silvery fur between her fingers, feeling the satin lining caress her bare skin. It was gorgeous, it was entirely too much, and Nora already knew she was going to give it back at the end of the night but she also knew she was going to enjoy wearing it all evening, first. “Let’s go.”

She sighed, feeling Mrs. Nilsson eavesdropping around the stairwell—she couldn’t forbid her boarders from going on dates, but she could hover disapprovingly.

Nora had never been inside the Amber Club. It seemed to bloom as they came in: low-ceilinged and intimate, amber-shaded lights turning the air golden, amber velvet curtains glowing behind the stage where Joe Reiss and his bandmates were already lilting a sultry rendition of “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So.”

Women in sequins listened from small tables through a purplish haze of cigarette smoke; men brought out their own bottles of vodka and whiskey as waiters glided back and forth with martini glasses and soda water. A raised section at the back, bigger tables heaped with poker chips, whispers and clinking glasses and the flick of cards...

“MissWalsh gets what she likes,”

Xavier told the nearest waiter, pulling out a chair for Nora at the high table. She pulled the chinchilla wrap close, feeling suddenly shabby in her blue rayon frock—she spent her clothes budget on work suits, not evening dresses, and all these sequins and satins would have been putting her to shame if not for the fur. Maybe he’d known she’d feel that way. “I won’t stay long,”

Xavier was saying, hand lingering at her wrist. “It’s boring, watching someone play cards. A few hands and we’re out. I just want you to get a feel for it all.”

Oh, I am , Nora thought. The way everyone here rippled as Xavier entered. “Boss,”

said the head waiter. “Boss,”

called the dealer at the back, raising a hand. “Boss,”

rumbled the thickset man by the door. They all turned toward him like sunflowers, waiting for his nod. She couldn’t hear what they said to him at the back table, but they waited as he took off his jacket, turned back his cuffs, called for a drink. “I’ll have whatever Mr. Byrne is having,”

Nora told the waiter, curious, and her brows shot up when she sipped at the amber fluid served in a brandy snifter. “ Apple juice? ”

“Mr.Byrne never touches a drop at work, miss.”

“I see.”

She sipped her juice, watching him focus fiercely through a few rounds of poker. He didn’t look up once, but he was somehow watching everything: he gestured without looking up when her drink needed refreshing; when two men at the next table started getting rowdy, and the bouncer rumbled forward to issue a warning. “Look at you, Nora Walsh,”

Joe Reiss said, grinning from the stage between sets, ash-fair hair gleaming. “All dolled up like a proper moll.”

“I’m nobody’s moll,”

she fired back. “Is that what they’re saying ?”

“Can’t hear you,”

he said innocently and waltzed into “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

That’s how they see me , Nora thought, an entirely different kind of hook twisting in her gut. Not MissWalsh of the National Archives, buttoned to the gills and stuffed with knowledge. Just a gangster’s girl in chinchilla, appraised up and down by the men here and enviously side-eyed by their overlipsticked girlfriends.

“I’m done.”

Xavier materialized back at her elbow, shrugging into his jacket. “Normally I play until two, but there’s something else I want to show you. Mind a quick cab ride?”

“Not at all.”

She took a welcome gulp of frosty night air as they left the club. “Did you win?”

“Won four.”

He saw a cab, raised a finger.

“Four dollars?”

“Four hundred.”

Nora gulped. Sliding into the cab, she couldn’t help but think of her brother, Tim, how much he liked a flutter at the precinct poker games. Usually those were the months he came round to dig into her pocketbook.

“I don’t play for the rush,”

Xavier said, reading her mind as he slid into the other side of the cab. “That’s gambling, not card-playing, and I don’t gamble. I play the numbers, count the cards. You do that, treat it like a job and not a game, you don’t lose much. Macomb Street,”

he told the cabbie.

“And where’d you learn to count cards?”

Nora persisted.

“The sharks in Vegas, after the war. I’m one of the better poker players on the Strip.”

He said it matter-of-factly, no boasting. Nora supposed that when you’d won four hundred dollars in less than an hour, without turning a hair, you had the right to call yourself that good. He took her hand, lacing their fingers together on the seat, and Nora realized the cab had left Foggy Bottom behind. A more upscale neighborhood, bigger houses with swaths of lawn, porch lights shining on Cadillac convertibles and Chevrolet Bel Airs. “Where is this?”

she asked as the cab pulled up in front of a neat white picket fence.

He flipped a few coins at the cabbie and handed her out onto the driveway. “My home.”

“ This? ”

“What, you thought I lived in some mobster’s lair over the club?”

Nora looked up at the house, slightly stunned. “I didn’t think you lived in a classic brick four-bedroom between Wisconsin and Massachusetts.”

He laughed, pulling her up the drive onto a gray slate porch and then through the door. Nora heard the padding of enormous paws, and then the Great Dane was capering around them in the entryway, tail lashing. “Duke,”

she greeted him, bending down to ruffle his ears, and couldn’t help laughing when the huge dog reared up, placed his paws on Xavier’s shoulders, and proceeded to give his master’s face a thorough washing. Xavier withstood it patiently, reached for a towel, then moved through the house switching on lights. A quiet, gracious house with a walnut bar, a bachelor’s kitchen, a den with deep leather armchairs. Xavier let Duke out into the backyard where Nora saw tidy flower beds. “I put roses in,”

Xavier’s voice sounded behind her. “I like pruning them myself. Getting my hands in the ground.”

She turned, seeing him on the porch in his shirtsleeves, hands in his pockets.

“This is me,”

he said simply. “How I live. It’s cards and clubs and late nights, yes, but it’s nothing bad. I play with my dog, I prune my roses, I know all my neighbors.”

“And you do other things,”

she said steadily. “You run errands for your uncles, you pick up the take for the numbers racket every day, you walk around armed—because the other things aren’t legal.”

“I’m not a crook,”

he said. “This is my life, and I want you in it.”

She pulled the chinchilla stole off her shoulders and piled it over the nearest chair.

“Stick around awhile is all I ask.”

He came closer, slipped his arms around her waist. “Talk is cheap, so let me show you I am what I say I am.”

He held her lightly; she could have tugged away in one step. Reaching up to her neat French twist, he pulled a pin out. “Stick around, Nora.”