Chapter 22 Faith

22

FAITH

They waited for over an hour, until the rest of the inmates had gone down for dinner, to sneak out the front door. May fetched them woolen capes from the charity closet. In silence, they let the wind whisk them down the walk, and they turned left to catch a streetcar. Mercifully, the snow had completely stopped, the edges of it already browned along the road, the sidewalks tamped by footprints.

They did not speak as they waited for the trolley. May stared straight ahead, her expression glassy.

Faith stamped her feet, trying to keep her toes warm. Ever since she’d pieced it all together—the revolver, the life insurance, the alleged admirers he’d boasted of— one of them’s likely to bump her off —she’d felt as if she were losing a footrace. She couldn’t warn Miss Ging quickly enough. But today was the day Hayward had tickets to the opera. He wouldn’t be going after Kitty today. They’d get to her in time.

Faith had expected May to argue, to defend Hayward, even after she’d vowed never to see him again. Mere days ago, May had boasted she was about to become Mrs. Harry Hayward; now she appeared to accept he was capable of murder. Faith hadn’t mentioned any of the ways in which she suspected he’d exploited May in his plotting, but she had to guess she’d been used.

“What did you tell the detective?” Faith knew they’d come to solve Priscilla’s murder, and that they suspected her. She’d listened, closely, all morning, as girls came and went from the reception room.

May kept her eyes trained on a locust tree across the street, its seed pods shivering in the wind. “I told him I’d never heard of the girl they were after; it sounded an awful lot like you. They think you killed Black, but I know you didn’t. It was Hayward himself.”

Faith put her hands inside the flap of her cloak, said nothing. How could she possibly summon words for Hayward’s defense? The man left a trail of destruction behind him a mile wide. But he hadn’t been the one to kill Priscilla Black. May had mistakenly added an extra body to his ledger.

May fidgeted for a while, tucking her hair into her cap, staring up the road in front of the streetcar stop, waiting, it seemed, for Faith to respond. Eventually, May sighed and laced her fingers in her lap. She wouldn’t even glance in Faith’s direction as the trolley came up the hill, its electric cable sparking against the purple-dark sky. When they boarded, May paid both their fares without comment. Over her shoulder, Faith watched May fish in her pocket for coins, then pull out an old quarter-dollar, Lady Liberty’s face worn flat, marred with little scratches. May dropped it into the fare box and turned the crank, collected the dime and nickel it spat back at her. Her change.

—

Marguerite the Magnificent had started with a purse full of change when she set up her card table and crystal ball in one of Priscilla Black’s parlor rooms. All green goods, of course, false money: it had been furnished by Hayward and Johnny. They’d dolled her up in one of Johnny’s wife’s gowns, a midnight-purple silk, and trotted her over to the red-light district one morning last summer. Not to become a whore, they assured Faith, but to read fortunes and have the opportunity to earn her own.

Priscilla had taken it upon herself to inspect the bills, one by one.

“This one don’t look right to me,” Priscilla said, laying one of the false banknotes on the table in front of Johnny. “The stamp’s off.” She tapped it with a long, yellowed fingernail. Her face had a hard look, as though any capacity for kindness had long since been wrung from her, if it ever existed to begin with. “What happens if a customer figures it out, pulls a knife? A number of the fellows we service lost their shirts in Argentina. They’re wary of a con.” She sneered at Faith when she spoke the word “con.”

“Perhaps you could dim your lighting,” Hayward suggested with a grin, gesturing to her lanterns. “That way no one looks too closely at his change.”

“I’ll take fifty percent of the cut and that’s final,” Priscilla concluded. “I’m the one putting my neck out here.”

She made no mention of the safety of Faith, who hadn’t said a word since the meeting began.

Hayward and Johnny had presented their plot to her as if it were an exciting, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They’d been looking for ways to launder their counterfeit banknotes, and they’d long thought a brothel would be the perfect place to do it. The problem was, you couldn’t trust brothel workers: they were likely to run away, or turn up dead. Their little fortune-teller, on the other hand: she possessed the cunning and sophistication to form a partnership with them. All she’d have to do was set up shop in one of the more respectable bordellos, where men with full pockets—“easy marks,” Hayward called them—swarmed like dragonflies. She’d read their fortunes and take their gold, giving them change in green goods.

“The Kitty Ging special,” Johnny had said, laughing, until Hayward shot him a look that shut him up. Faith wasn’t sure what he meant, not yet, but she tucked that phrase into her memory. The Kitty Ging special .

Coincidentally or not, Mrs. Lundberg had fired her just that morning. She hadn’t given a reason, or even delivered the news in person: she’d had the cook do it for her. “I guess she’s tired of listening to you two carry on,” Cook sneered, after she mentioned there’d be no back pay. Faith had no choice, then, but to go along with the scheme. It hadn’t sounded too disagreeable to her, not at first. She wouldn’t mind working alongside bagnio girls; she had an instinct they’d be warmer to her than the servants and cooks she’d encountered. The part she didn’t tell Hayward and Johnny was that she didn’t plan on staying for long. Once she’d assembled a goodly nest egg for herself, she’d board a train heading west and set up a fortune-telling booth in a mining or cattle-ranching town, somewhere new and raw and ripe with possibilities, where no one had a past, only a future.

In Black’s parlor, Hayward tapped his cigar in the ashtray and smiled at the madam. “I’d say our fortune-teller’s neck is closest to the chopping block, my dear Miss Black. It’s fifteen percent for her, twenty-five for you—for providing the venue—and thirty each for my partner and me.” He winked at Faith, showing he’d look after her.

She’d thought he cared about her, at least as an interesting friend, at that point. She hadn’t fully understood that the only thing he cared about was money.

“Or we’ll take our business elsewhere,” he said casually.

Priscilla frowned, stroking her crepey neck; she seemed reluctant to admit they’d called her bluff, but they had. “She’s comely, I’ll give you that,” she said, gesturing toward Faith.

“The most beautiful girl in Minneapolis,” Johnny crowed. “None of your customers will be looking at his money.”

In the end, they shook hands, and when Faith got up to leave with the men, Johnny turned around and stopped her.

“You’ll stay here,” he said quietly, looking past her at Priscilla. Hayward was already out the door. Faith’s eyes must have jumped in alarm; Johnny’s softened in response. “Well, you don’t work for me anymore, do you? What did you expect?” He kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll be back to visit you as soon as tomorrow. Do good.”

This should have been her first sign that something was not right, when Priscilla led her, a smug half-smile, half-frown on her face, to a room in the bordello with a single window that looked out onto a brown brick wall.

“One of our best bedrooms,” Priscilla had said in a huff, “so thank your lucky stars.”

Faith opened her mouth to thank the madam but stopped. Though she was trying to discern what lurked behind the woman’s eyes, Priscilla read like a wall of onyx. Opaque. Guarded. Faith could detect something there, something dark and shrewd. Priscilla’s nervous eyes twitched toward a corner of the room, and she wore an odd little smile on her lips. Clearly, the madam didn’t want to be thanked. She slammed the door shut without another word and thundered down the stairs.

Faith waited in that room for hours the first night, unsure whether to go down for dinner. Nobody came and got her. No one brought her a nightdress, not yet; she slept in the purple silk, not realizing how dirty and ragged the gown would soon become.

She lay awake, listening to her neighbors’ doors open and close. Their beds creaked. Their mattresses groaned and sighed.

—

As their streetcar chugged downtown, the buildings grew taller and more solid, the boulevard got wider, and Faith mused how little she knew of this city where she’d been living almost two years. She’d memorized the attic rooms and back staircases of some of its grander homes, and she knew all too well the warren of parlors and reception rooms, bedrooms and toilets of Priscilla Black’s brothel. But she didn’t recognize this section of Hennepin Avenue, its theaters with their faux-Greek fa?ades, its bakeries and banks, closed and shuttered this hour of night. The few pedestrians strolling the sidewalks walked with their heads bent into the wind, coats and mufflers pulled over their faces so that only their eyes were visible.

“We’re here,” May said quietly. She stood up and held on to the metal pole, waiting for the trolley to stop, her body swaying with the motions of the streetcar. Her face looked pale, even greenish.

Faith followed her out onto the street; the air bit at their faces before they’d even descended the last step. The streetcar’s bell clanged. As it lumbered forward, Faith got a glance at the building across the street.

“That’s where she lives,” May said, her voice getting carried away in the wind. “The Ozark Flats.”

The Ozark Flats . Faith mouthed the words. The name was faintly familiar. A handsome red brick building with arched windows on the third and fourth floors, covered balconies at some of the apartments. They hurried across the street, the chill from the river whipping at their coats as they emerged from the shelter of the buildings, then into the vestibule of the Ozark Flats. Through the shining glass door, they could see the carpeted interior of the lobby, lit by electric chandeliers. Faith tried the door, but found it locked.

She turned to see May waiting at the bottom of the concrete steps, breathing rapidly. Puffs of her breath, visible in the cold, swirled from her mouth like steam from an engine.

“There’s a bell,” Faith said quietly. “We could ring Miss Ging’s apartment.”

“No!” May shrieked. “Don’t ring it.”

Faith paused, her fingers hovering over the buzzer. May came up and tugged at her elbow. “I’ve made a mistake. We must go home now. Before anyone sees us.”

May had begun hyperventilating, her cold breath making wheezing sounds. Faith led her around the side of the building and into a service alley where the sides of the Ozark Flats and its neighbor pressed together, the brickwork plain and pale. A single weak light illuminated a door cut into the wall, leading, presumably, to the basement. May huddled against the bricks beside the door, her face turned skyward and eyes closed, her chest heaving up and down.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered when she could speak. “I’m sorry I brought you here.”

Faith tried to keep her voice even, her mind clear. “Doesn’t Kitty Ging live here?”

May nodded and swallowed. “She does. But so does Hayward.”

Faith felt as though she’d been kicked by a horse. Her body went rigid with shock. She leaned against the wall and slid down it, her spine to the bricks, until her bottom came to rest on the wet ground. May followed suit.

“I’m sorry,” May said again. “I didn’t want to bring you here. I’ve enjoyed your company, always. He’s got such sway over me. He told me to bring you to him and I…I simply couldn’t resist. I…”

Faith shook her head, quieting May. “It’s hogwash,” she said grimly. “There is no Mesmerism. There is only convincing people it’s all right to do what they already wish.”

Quietly, May began to cry. Faith might have been too harsh with her, but she couldn’t worry about that now. She could only think of Hayward and what he’d done to her.

Whatever shame May felt at having worked in a sporting house—Faith had intuited almost from the beginning that this was the case, even though May had buried the memories so deeply it seemed she had almost convinced herself they didn’t happen—it must have paled in comparison with the helplessness, the sheer terror that had consumed Faith when she discovered the true purpose for which Hayward and Lundberg had brought her to work for Priscilla Black. Faith had been so stupid to believe any of them thought men would pay to have their fortunes read at a house of ill fame. The clients were there for something else, something very particular, something she hoped May’s johns had never demanded.

A special sort of evil had gone into Priscilla’s design for Faith. She’d spread the word through back alleys and channels that she’d gotten her hands on a real Argentine—not only a bona fide Argentine courtesan, but a debutante! A daughter of industry, offspring of the very barons and tycoons the men of Minneapolis had invested money with before they lost it so badly. Priscilla had let her clients do anything they wanted to Faith—encouraged it, even. She must have recognized that she’d gotten hold of a true prize: a girl who wouldn’t talk back, who had no friends she could count on. Worse, whose friends had sold her up the river. Faith could never be certain how much Hayward and Lundberg knew about what was happening to her at Priscilla’s. But they kept supplying Priscilla with green goods, and continued, Faith presumed, to collect their share of the fat profits, none of which went to her.

Her rage toward them grew over her months at Priscilla’s, became a hot, pulsating thing behind her eyes. How could she have misinterpreted their intentions so badly, how could she have thought they truly saw her as an equal, a partner? She’d always been a bit suspicious of Hayward, but Johnny had found a way to slip past her best defenses. She’d enjoyed sleeping with him; she’d persuaded herself he was a decent man.

Faith pressed her fingers to her eyes. She longed to tell May all of this, but May would ask why Faith hadn’t simply run away from Priscilla’s. How could she explain? There had been ample opportunities, now that Faith looked back: when all of Priscilla’s girls would traipse to the courthouse once a month, Faith could have shouted to the bailiff or one of the police officers that she was being held against her will. But who would have believed her? Priscilla had been such a slick talker, and Faith barely able to string two words together without choking on them. Frequently, Priscilla reminded all her girls that they were deeply in her debt, for the bed, board, heat, and clothing she supposedly provided. She could have any one of them brought in for theft if she wanted. To demonstrate, Priscilla invited the sheriff’s men to visit the brothel regularly, plied them with the best liquor, or at least cheap liquor in good bottles. Some of them she sent upstairs with Faith.

That last john had meant to murder her, to choke her to death. Priscilla would have let him if Faith hadn’t managed to scream, if the few friends she’d made in the brothel—good girls, they were, and not much better off under Priscilla’s watch than Faith was—hadn’t burst in to pry him off. They’d badgered him into paying her in gold, after he collected himself and pretended the whole thing had been a joke.

Faith had gripped the coins in her fist, as well as the rest of the gold she’d collected earlier that day, and resolved to escape that very night, even if it spelled death. For herself, or someone else.

“Faith, please. We have to go home.” May waved her hand in front of Faith’s face. “I can’t let Hal see you.”

Slowly, Faith shook her head. “We’re here now. We will find Miss Ging.”

As May’s mouth opened, they heard a sound coming from the far end of the alley. A man was walking toward them. The two of them scrambled to their feet, May clutching at Faith’s sleeve. She tried to focus on the stranger in the dark, his hunched figure.

“It’s not him,” Faith murmured. This man was shorter, bulkier than Hayward. He was crying, she realized as he came closer. He hung his head, making a keening sound, his eyes squeezing shut as he stumbled forward. His hands were covered in some sort of dirt. He wore simple clothing, a drab brown coat in a rough material, a misshapen hat, gray trousers with muddied hems. A custodian, she thought, which explained why he’d be using the alley door and not the front one.

Faith cleared her throat. She’d hoped May would ask him if he’d let them in to see Miss Ging, but May had turned into a statue.

“Excuse me, sir,” Faith said, hoping he’d be able to hear her.

The man looked up and stopped short, staring at them as if he’d seen a pair of ghosts. Then he crept closer—one step, another. His eyes were rimmed with red, his nose running, his burly mustache glistening. He looked to have been out in the cold for some time, his lips purplish, his bare hands chapped. As he came under the glow of the single lightbulb, Faith could see that his hands were red, too, that what she’d assumed was mud was, in fact, somebody’s blood. He was covered in it.

A sob lodged in her throat.

“Who…” the man said, looking from her to May. “Who are you? Why are you here?” Faith detected a hint of an accent, something Scandinavian. The man sniffed loudly, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

Neither of them could answer him. May had gone stiff with fear. Faith’s veins ran cold as she came to grips with the fact that Hayward had already done it.

Kitty Ging was dead. He’d had this man kill her.

The man sniffed audibly, flaring his nostrils above his bushy mustache. It seemed he might be regretting what he’d just done: look at how he wept. Faith took a timid step forward, her boot crunching the iced-over snow. He flinched, squinting at her with his bulbous eyes. As though she might hurt him . The realization flooded her with a sense of command, and she found her voice.

“We’re here to help,” she said soothingly. She had always found it easier to speak to people who seemed desperate or frightened, who she could tell needed her. Somehow, she found it possible to look past the blood on his hands and into his eyes, stricken with an animal terror. “Look at you. You’ve been through a trial.”

May gasped and tightened her hold on Faith’s sleeve. She hoped May would understand what she was doing.

The man’s eyes darted between the two of them. “Did he send you?”

“No,” said Faith quickly. “No, we’re here in spite of him.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the man sighed, lowering his rounded shoulders an inch. “All right. All right, come in. Come in, you can help me with the…” He trailed off. He used his key to open the alley door, whimpering a little and muttering about his stained coat, the trousers, how he’d have to burn them. He went inside, letting the door yawn open behind him. Through the doorway, Faith could see a set of industrial wrought-iron stairs, leading down into a darkened cellar. She took a deep breath and made to follow him, but May held her back.

Faith turned to peel May’s fingers from her arm. “We have to,” she whispered.

“No. Please!” May’s chest heaved in her terror, her eyes darting from the cellar door back to Faith. “We can still get away from him. This is our chance.”

Faith shook her head. She felt her chin tremble. “He’ll have killed Kitty with your gun. You must take it back or you’ll hang with him.”

May’s jaw fell open. The pieces, it seemed, were sliding into place for her.

Faith extricated herself and hurried inside, her eyes working to adjust to the dark. She could see the hulking figure of the custodian at the base of the staircase, traveling down a damp, scantly lit hallway, its ceiling a web of dripping pipes. She swallowed and took a step down, then another. The iron stairs felt sharp through the thin soles of her boots.