The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

  I’m so sorry, she would say. You good mensch, you were too late. The dragon ate him.

  No. There in the corner, I spotted a familiar head of tousled brown curls and released my held breath.

  They had given Frankie a cot by the window, shielded from the other beds by a linen divider. He was tucked in like a child, the white sheet folded at waist level, his arms resting on either side of him. Bandages encased his bare chest.

  “Frankie.” My voice came out in a whisper, my mouth so dry that my throat clicked when I swallowed. I sat down by his bedside and put my hand over his. He didn’t respond to my voice or touch. His warm complexion had blanched to an ashen gray, his thick eyelashes cast over the bruised crescents of his lower lids.

  I struggled to swallow the choking lump in my throat. “Frankie, it’s me, Alter.”

  No response. Could he feel my presence? Did he know that I was here?

  “He probably can’t hear you,” the nurse said, stripping an empty cot of its sheets.

  My breath caught in my throat. “What?”

  “He was given laudanum.” The nurse emptied another patient’s bedpan into a tin bucket. The stench of waste soiled my nostrils. There were other odors under the first. Rot. Decay. Burnt flesh.

  “When will he wake up?” I asked, but she was already moving on. Clearing out the final bedpan, she left the room.

  I turned back to Frankie once she was gone and held his hand even tighter, as if that could convince him to open his eyes.

  “Please, just come back to me,” I whispered.

  His fingers pressed against my palm like slivers of ice. Just hours ago, his grip had been warm and strong. The change was gut-wrenching. If I didn’t know any better now, I could have been gripping the hand of a corpse.

  “Alter,” he mumbled, so softly that I almost thought I imagined it.

  “Frankie!” My vision fogged up with tears of relief as he cracked open his eyes.

  “You got my message.” He sighed deeply. “I was afraid...you wouldn’t be there. I’m sorry for what I did. I’m so sorry.”

  “No. No. Don’t apologize.”

  “Listen. I heard them.” He spoke laboriously, his slurred voice trailing in and out. “Mr. Whitby and Grigori... They were talking...about starting a fire.”

  An involuntary shiver racked my body as I recalled the burning shul, the smoke scorching my lungs. I leaned forward in my seat. “A fire? Where?”

  “It’s all cloudy.” His eyes fluttered shut, his breathing slowing down. “I’m so tired.”

  “Hey. Hey.” I squeezed his hand. “Don’t fall asleep yet. Try to remember.”

  “The fairgrounds. This afternoon.”

  “The Wild West Show?”

  “No. Cold. Cold...” His fingers loosened in mine. He rested his cheek against the pillow and slipped into sleep. I sat there for a moment longer, counting his breaths, just to be sure.

  I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed the battered knuckles, kissed the clammy fingers. I drew up the covers to warm him. “I’ll be back.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Before I left his room, I emptied out all the pitchers and water basins, the way you were supposed to do after a person had died. What the nurses had probably forgotten to do. The Angel of Death washed his knife in the water, soiled it, poisoned it.

  If I hadn’t met Frankie at the World’s Fair, the Angel of Death wouldn’t have marked him. That was how it felt, at least. That greater forces were at work here than just Grigori and me, and more blood would be spilled. In giving me my name, my parents had deprived the Angel of Death of his rightful due. Now, after seventeen years, he was finally coming to collect.

  47

  The elevated train lurched forward, belching smoke from its flued chimneys. I kept my eyes planted on the floor, counting the specks of mud and lint. By the time the train reached the last stop, it was crowded with tourists.

  I paused on the platform and took in gulps of cool air. Stepping aside to let other passengers pass, I checked my pocket watch. Two o’clock. The next show wouldn’t begin until three, which gave me plenty of time to scout out the area and see where the Cossacks were rooming.

  I didn’t know how I would kill Grigori now that he knew what I looked like, only that I had to try. I didn’t have a choice. With each passing hour, my body felt less and less like my own. As I descended the stairs to street level, I had the persistent and disturbing sensation of floating above myself.

  The crowd diverged at the bottom of the stairs, most heading to the World’s Fair, some going in the direction of the Wild West Show. I merged with the latter group and followed them across the street.

  The afternoon crowd was mild in comparison to the masses that had confronted Frankie and me the night before. My calm didn’t last. As I entered the lot in the group’s wake, I felt exposed and vulnerable, nauseous with fear. My wounded shoulder throbbed in agony.

  After I bought a ticket, I broke away from the crowd and retreated into the shadow of the bleachers. There was something comforting and homey in the scent of damp wood and livestock. Breathing in the warm, musky fragrance, I remembered Piatra Neamţ, the taste of cheese blintzes, and the crowing of roosters in the morning. The past felt so close, I could reach out and touch it.

  But the past was not a place to which I could return. It was a frozen memory, a dybbuk. All that mattered now was the future. I needed to keep moving.

  You belong here, I told myself firmly as I walked between the small tents at the Wild West Show. You’re American. You belong.

  Still, when I came across a pair of workers sharing a cigarette between them, it took all my confidence to meet their eyes and nod. Neither man smiled, but they didn’t frown either, which I took as a good sign. I kept on walking, passing paddocks filled with horses, cows, and shaggy-furred cattle that I realized must be buffalos.

  At a hitch near one of the pens, a Cossack performer tended to his horse. I caught a glimpse of his face as he retrieved a brush from the bucket at his feet, and quickly retreated into the shadow of a tent. It was the young swordsman who had intervened during the fight, standing between Grigori and me.

  The boy glanced my way, but I didn’t think he saw me. I retreated before he could take a closer look and continued deeper into the grounds.

  Soon, I came to an area occupied by white tents. I situated myself in the shadows and waited.

  I drew out my pocket watch and counted the minutes as they ticked by. Twenty minutes until the show began. If the other men hadn’t already left their tents, they would soon enough.

  A sudden gust swept through the showground, rattling the tents and sending a cowboy chasing after his hat. The flapping of the oilcloth resembled the rustling of vast wings. A realization struck me in an instant. In the vision I had experienced after Mr. Katz had chloroformed me, the object I had seen swaying atop the flooded sunflower field had been a canvas tent.

  There was only one explanation. On the night of his death, Yakov had been here. He had been watching. Waiting. He must have followed Grigori from the Wild West Show to the White City, or perhaps he had been lured there without even realizing it, like a bloodhound led to a pitfall.

  After several more minutes, a group of Cossack performers appeared from one of the tents. I couldn’t make out the men’s features from where I stood, but I knew that Grigori must be among them.

  I lingered out of sight, afraid to come out of hiding. When no one else appeared and the men were out of sight, I took a step from the shadows.

  “I guess it’s time to go,” I said, waiting for a voice to tell me otherwise, or invisible arms to tug me back. No such thing, just a mooring warmth that spread between my fingers. The soothing pressure of a hand holding my own.

  “He never gave you a chance to live, did he?” I murmured.

  Silence. But the memory of
the burning shul was the only answer I needed.

  Before I could change my mind, I hurried to the tent. I drew open the flaps and ducked inside, entering the cool shade.

  Cots, trunks, and rickety shelving occupied the space. There were six beds total, two against each wall, steamer trunks at their feet. If I could find Grigori’s trunk, perhaps there would be a clue to where he intended to start the fire. At the very least, I could find evidence connecting him to Mr. Whitby or proof of his crimes.

  I searched through the first trunk, rummaging through clothes and keepsakes. Nothing of interest.

  The owner’s name was written on the lid in greasepaint. Владислав Петровић. It might as well have been Chinese or Arabic. The second time I looked at the letters, they began to look a little more like Yiddish, and by the third glance, they resolved into an alphabet I could understand. Vladislav Petrovich.

  I moved on. I couldn’t explain it, but I sensed that when I found the right trunk, I would just know.

  As I plowed through the second trunk, I strained to hear the sound of approaching footsteps. My body was a knot of raw nerves and nausea, my lungs crushed against my rib cage like a prisoner in an iron maiden.

  By the third trunk, I was ready to give up. My frantic search uncovered a plethora of random objects—clothing, shoe brushes, buttonhooks, photographs of wives and sweethearts, tins of wax and pastes—things that seemed so ordinary, so human.

  I didn’t know what I expected to find. I needed to remind myself that this man, whoever he was, was not a monster. Not on the outside, at least.

  The fifth trunk belonged to someone named Grigori Antonovich and yielded more of the same ordinary trappings. Near the bottom, I found a dusty box painted with Russian lacquer-work. I opened the box’s lid, shedding light on a scatter of trinkets—a tarnished silver chain, braided bits of human hair, a flour-sack doll rubbed raw by a child’s hands. At the bottom of the container, there was a small pile of cotton squares, some stiff and brown, others merely dappled. An involuntary shiver racked me, and I dropped the stack of swatches back in the box.

  During tahara, it wasn’t uncommon for a person to continue bleeding after death. When that happened, we would collect the blood, the dam nefesh, on cloth swabs that would be buried with the body.

  I had assisted in enough washings to know what I was looking at.

  Grigori hadn’t kept these remnants to inter them with the dead. These were keepsakes. These were trophies.

  I picked up the doll. Its hair was black yarn, and its eyes were shoe buttons. It barely weighed anything at all, the sort of toy a little girl could carry everywhere. Tears prickled my eyes. This was not the proof I had been searching for, but it was proof, nonetheless. Of what exactly? I didn’t even want to think about it.

  Behind me, there was the soft, dry whisper of the tent fold being parted. I turned, box in hand, as the young swordsman stepped inside.

  I dropped the doll and drew the revolver from my pocket. “Don’t move!”

  He stopped, his dark analytical eyes flickering from the gun in my hand to the doll that lay in the dust, then back again.

  “You’re not a thief,” he stated plainly.

  His frank statement jarred me. It wasn’t until the final word left his mouth that I realized he hadn’t been speaking in Yiddish, even though the words had sounded like Yiddish when they passed through my head. I had Yakov to thank for that, I supposed.

  “I’m not,” I said at last.

  “There’s no need for the gun.”

  A familiar shame crept over me, the shame of slipping past a stranger in the street and relieving him of his wallet without him even knowing it. I had made an oath to myself that I would never steal again. This wasn’t stealing, but it felt like it.

  The boy took a step toward me, and it took all my self-control not to raise the revolver and track his movements. He was not my enemy.

  “Yuri Ilyitch,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “I’m not giving you my name.”

  “I don’t expect you to.” He leaned down and picked up the flour-sack doll. When he lifted his gaze, sorrow welled in his eyes. “Did you find this in his trunk?”

  “And the rest.” I set the box on the cot and stepped away so that he could examine it closer. As he sorted through the box’s contents, I explained to him about how Yakov had been found at the fairgrounds.

  “I believe you,” Yuri said, after a long moment. “Two weeks ago, he returned in the middle of the night, his clothes covered in blood. He told me...he told me that he had butchered a swine running loose. He threatened to kill me if I told anyone.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “I have no animosity toward your people. I think we’re more similar than you realize.”

  I laughed before I could stop myself, then felt a twinge of remorse. Holding Yuri responsible for the actions of his predecessors was no different than being called Christ-killer. He was innocent of any wrongdoing. There was no blood on his hands.

  “I mean it,” Yuri said. “My ancestors came from the Danubian Sich. In the 1700s, we were exiled from Russia and settled in parts of the Ottoman Empire. For my family, it was Bucharest and Brailov.”

  Bucharest and Brailov? A jolt of shock rippled through me. Those cities were in Romania.

  “I passed through Bucharest on my way to America,” I said. “But I’ve never been to Brăila, what you call Brailov.”

  “Neither have I. This was my great-grandfather’s time. Seventy years ago, we returned to Russia and were welcomed back by the tsar. My family has lived there ever since, but...” Yuri sighed. “But I long for more. I want to travel. I want to see the world.”

  “As do I.” I parted the flaps at the rear of the tent. “But there’s something I need to do first.”

  “Grigori Antonovich,” Yuri said.

  I looked back.

  “He was supposed to perform today, but I saw him leave about fifteen minutes ago. He said he was going to the Fair.”

  “Thank you.”

  Yuri hesitated. “I can come with you. Help you find him. You don’t need to do this alone.”

  I smiled thinly. “I am not alone.”

  48

  As I retraced my steps through the showgrounds, gunshots echoed in my ears. Long after I had left the Wild West Show behind me, I could still feel the vibrations of those explosions, a thrum as steady as a second heartbeat.

  I entered the World’s Fair through the side entrance across the street from the Wild West Show. The cashier took my last half dollar without remark and gave me a ticket.

  The first several times I had gone to the White City, I had been awed and overwhelmed by its beauty. Now, all that confronted me were its shadows—the swarming crowds of people, the trash littering the walkways, the hollow spaces.

  If Grigori had come here in a suit and top hat, he would blend in as effortlessly as any American. Finding him wouldn’t be easy.

  As I hurried down the verdant walkways and pastoral gardens of the midway, I saw it through his eyes. Here was the Congo, here was Japan, here was Albania, here was Cairo—snippets of the world replicated and sterilized, confined behind walls and fences like animal exhibits.

  In Grigori’s perfect world, there would be no shtetl, only the depiction of one. A family sitting around a pair of Shabbos candles, surrounded by a barrier that observers could peek and prod through. No. Nothing so ordinary, so domestic, so blameless. More like a moneylender with a hooked nose and corkscrew payos, one gnarled hand clutching a sack of money close to his heart and the other hand outstretched for more. Frozen like that. Forever.

  For people like Grigori and Mr. Whitby, it needed to be that way. There needed to be a memory of us, even if it was a false one. Because once we were gone, who would
they blame next?

  I tore through crowds, searching for Grigori. The midway yielded nothing. The Court of Honor, nothing. The Grand Basin—an empty reflection.

  I wanted to yell in aggravation. The White City was a labyrinth of lagoons and tended gardens, and spread throughout it all, towering buildings crammed from floor to ceiling with exhibits. Animals from foreign lands, preserved in formaldehyde or embalmed and stuffed with sawdust. Paper goods, linen that would go up in smoke, toxic paints and chemicals. He could have been anywhere.

  As I followed the Grand Basin along, something snagged at the back of my mind like a splinter. Something was wrong about this entire situation. Why would Grigori come here to set a fire, even if it had been at Mr. Whitby’s bidding?

  The White City was a symbol of America’s grandeur. It was not a shul. It was multicultural, but only as a way of demonstrating America’s superiority over all. So why a fire? Why here?

  I stepped up to the map plastered onto the wall of the bandstand. So many places. If the purpose of the fire was to send a message, it would be set at the Court of Honor, no doubt. Except the Court of Honor showcased the most expensive exhibits, so it would also be swarming with Columbian Guards.

  At the corner of the map, a building name caught my eye. Cold Storage.

  Cold, Frankie had whispered from his laudanum daze. He hadn’t been asking me to tuck him under the blanket. He had been warning me. That had to be it!

  I twisted around and rushed back toward the western entrance. As I neared, the rumble of trains filled my ears. The Cold Storage building was located by the railroad tracks, out of sight and overlooked. A perfect place to start a fire and make a hasty escape.

  I slipped though a crowd of tourists strolling along the walkway, narrowly avoiding being impaled by the metal tip of a lady’s parasol as she bobbed it merrily about. A part of me resented the group’s laughter and ease. I wanted to seize those gentlemen by their starched collars, shake them, and shout, couldn’t they see what was happening here? What would happen?