by Chip Jacobs
Jules moved back from the bars to stand under a bulb hanging forlornly from the ceiling. “I deserved that, but I’ll explain everything,” she said. “For now, I need a favor.”
“Don’t ask me to smuggle a hacksaw in a cake.”
“Save the levity for later.”
“I’m joking to assuage myself.”
“Stop assuaging then. I need you to go to Western Telegram and wire my father. Tell him I’m embroiled in a landlord dispute that has me predisposed, and that I require a fifty-dollar loan. That’s my bail amount.”
“Whoa. You’re living a double life and expect me to be complicit?” he whispered, so as not to rouse the coot. That ring in his pocket could’ve been on the moon.
Jules returned to the cell door. Unlike before, Nick didn’t grip her fingers. “Precisely,” she said. “I’m in here for a noble purpose: for your city.”
Always a sucker for idealism, that got to him. “Okeydoke. I’ll do whatever you request. Provided you give me the whole skinny, including your—”
Nick halted when Jep reentered the room. The pizza-faced jail cop sat down behind the desk and picked up the newspaper to mask his inmate eavesdropping. Taking up the entire back page was Adolphus’s tome-length obituary.
“And that includes your disappearances,” Nick murmured. “No more ‘When I’m ready.’”
“Promise,” Jules said.
—
Not long after, Nick was on bended knee, and it wasn’t inside the wicker basket of a balloon on what was supposed to be a night of exultation. It was under the desk in his bungalow, loosening the floorboard where he stashed his rainy-day-only cash. He’d be dining on saltines and salami for weeks.
Breakfasts would be tricky, as well, courtesy of the genius dog that never missed a chance to avail himself of human delicacies. In the time he’d been gone, Royo looted his pantry again, despite the eye-hook latch Nick bolted to repel his incursions, and emptied his cornflakes; last week he gashed half a loaf of pumpernickel. If Nick didn’t know better, he’d posit that the Royo learned to scoot his desk chair over and back so he could unclasp the hook by his snout without tipping off how he’d achieved it.
Now he had two thieves in his world. Royo, habitual food felon, was coming with him.
At police headquarters, Nick leashed his hound around a fire hydrant, imploring him to be good. This included not snarling at uppity people, or doing his Oliver-Twist-esque street hustle, where he begged gullible passersby with food to break off some for him after he lifted up a trembling paw he faked was deformed.
Nick had to wait a couple minutes before Jules walked up from her cellblock, and a few minutes more while she signed paperwork agreeing to appear in court Monday to hear the preliminary charges against her. After she slashed her signature across the forms, she asked the mustached, heard-it-all desk sergeant whether detectives were “pursuing other subjects, as I am not the prolific burglar you are after. Search my house. You will not locate a single object of anyone’s property. Not so much as a souvenir glass rose.”
“We do have the bead on a suspect, miss,” the sergeant said. “I’d worry about atoning for your own behavior, though. Orange Grove’s mansions aren’t your playgrounds.”
Nick, thinking a guy on his engagement evening has his limits, handed Jules the fifty dollars for her bail and then burst out the station doors ahead of her. He zipped down the steps, untied Royo, and gestured Jules over to him. “So,” he said, “how many houses did you creep into?”
“Seven,” Jules answered without hesitation. “That sounds like an awful lot, doesn’t it?”
Nick stared at her. Even one sounded like too many.
Under the streetlight, Jules’s pretty face seesawed between contrition and defiance. “If you come with me,” she said, “I’ll show why you I hazarded doing it.”
They walked east in stony silence until they passed a hot-dog vendor where Jules slowed, licking her lips. “I’ll faint if I don’t eat,” she said. “It’s been twenty hours. You want anything?”
“No,” Nick said. “I’ve suddenly lost my appetite.”
She bought three hot dogs with spare change at the bottom of her purse: two for her and one for Royo.
Fifteen minutes later, they were winding along the path by Ivy Wall, where they’d stolen kisses before, and descended into Busch Gardens. The Arroyo’s vivid autumn colors were in nocturnal repose as the three of them went past the splashy water wheel and replica Snow White dwarfs. They were at the Gingerbread Hut before long.
There, disheveled Jules was eager to spill her story; Nick’s body language, conversely, was taut as a crossbow. “Don’t,” he said, “expect me to be a pushover because we have history here.”
“I don’t expect anything,” Jules said in her wrinkled dress. “I hope you’ll listen with an open heart—and a flexible imagination.”
They entered the hut that they’d sexually desecrated and squeezed themselves onto wooden chairs sized for munchkins. Nick turned on the oil lamp stored there for kiddy scavenger hunts; Royo curled under the table.
“You’ve begged to learn my past,” Jules said. “Now you’ll hear it.”
She told it swiftly, like a toxin she needed flushed from her veins. Daughter of an autocratic businessman dismissive of her adolescent independence and fascination with world movements; a girl whose mother prized her but lacked the fortitude to defend her; a teen diagnosed with anxiety and mild kleptomania. “Yes, Nick, I shoplifted merchandise when I was younger, I’m ashamed to say.”
Nick’s eyebrows ridged. “What sort of merchandise?”
“Anything that fit into my purse: cheap bracelets, pens, key chains. I didn’t covet any of it. The subversive in me took them, and my Catholic guilt was repulsed. A tug-of-war raged inside of me at seventeen.”
Royo, hearing the words “tug-of-war,” his favorite game, raised his head. Nick shoved it down.
“Father,” Jules continued, “insisted I was a brat trying to discredit him after I was arrested for returning a snow globe to the Sears store on Michigan Avenue where I stole it. While we didn’t get along, I wasn’t attempting to smear him. I was a straight-A student. I worked at soup kitchens in the summers and could best any neighborhood boy at marbles. I just happened to suffer a nervous disorder through no fault of my own. But to teach me a lesson over the snow globe, even though the police dropped charges, he made humiliation my punishment.”
“How?”
“He compelled me to parade in front of Sears with a sign around my neck with the word ‘Criminal’ on it—in the middle of the day.”
Nick glowered. “Am I supposed to pity you now, say that accounts for your reluctance to speak during the day?” He was twisting a piece of straw, which earlier fluttered down from the hut’s thatched roof, around a purpling finger.
“No. What claim do I have for pity in a world of deprivation? I want to be understood. Anyway, when we arrived home, it was still light out and I was too rattled to say a peep. Father then accused me of staging an act.” Jules paused so as not to melt. “And you know what that beast did? He snatched the beagle puppy that I’d beseeched my mother for to rectify my loneliness after my brother left for college and tossed my Lizzy out the door. I watched from my upstairs windows when she darted onto the busy street and a funeral carriage, if you can believe it, squashed her. He indirectly murdered the one creature that loved me as much as Royo worships you. It was then I had real difficultly expressing myself during the day. Soon, I began plotting my escape from his stranglehold. I won a scholarship to Northwestern and haven’t stepped foot home since.”
It was now Nick reaching for Jules’s hand and Jules denying him contact. “Horrid,” he said quietly. “His vindictiveness crushed you into silence. And here you later fall for me, an inventor focused on the sun. That squares the circle. I’m still confused, though. Did somet
hing in Pasadena incite a relapse of your kleptomania?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t kleptomania. I’m over that. It was—” The stress of Nick’s question, of everything, overloaded her. Ick, ick, she hiccupped. “Damn it. First time I’ve had a flare-up of these in California,” she said. Ick. “And I’ve had reasons for anxiety here. Just wait.” Ick.
“I am.”
Jules held her breath trying to extinguish her hiccups; it failed. Ick. She’d have to convey the story of how she became a jailbird over her spasm-ing diaphragm.
“The Svengali, or whatever he is,” she said, sat down uninvited next to her on a park bench not far from here. It was a peaceful Sunday after her first week working for Lilly. She was rereading Wuthering Heights, trying to acclimate to a new town.
Jules then recited the Svengali’s introductory lines. “Ms. Cumbersmith, I most urgently need to speak with you. You have been deigned for a mission, by forces above me, that only you can complete. We know everything about you, from your favorite color (burgundy), and first kiss (Joseph Palmer, on that rainy field trip to Lake Michigan), to your diary entry lamenting your mother’s choice in men, to your train seat (row seven, seat two) traveling west. Your favorite candle is honey-lavender. However, you are graced with free will, so you may accept our challenge or disregard it.”
Her first instinct, she said, was to scream or flee from the quack, preying on her for money, sex, or other nefarious intent. As he continued speaking, a premonition blossomed inside her that he was pursuing none of those. “Before you ask, knowing your penchant for details, he refused to disclose his name, and I cannot for the life of me recall his face. Believe me, I’ve tried reconstructing it a thousand times.” Ick, ick. “I only remember the basso inflection in his voice, its sterling confidence. He said, ‘our solicitation will necessitate bravery, faith—and your willingness to pick locks. Your objective is to recover a valuable object inscribed with words of wisdom.’”
“My sympathies were with you before,” Nick said, now drumming his fingers on the table, “but a Svengali? Asking you to commit crimes in his name? This stretches credulity.”
“I agree. It does.” Ick, ick. “And I reproached him for speaking evangelical jibber-jabber. I even threatened to knife him in the gonads with the letter opener in my purse if he weren’t more forthright. ‘Be my guest, Ms. Cumbersmith,’ he said. ‘You’ll merely snap the tip into the bench, wasting the dime you paid for it at the Merz Apothecary in Chicago when you were twelve years, two months, and fourteen days old. My genitalia, like me, are vapory.”
“This is nonsensical,” Nick said in a huffy tone. “What was the object? A goblin’s tie clip?”
“No, smart-aleck, a plaque, a gold-embossed plaque he said he’d created and mounted near Colorado Street and Orange Grove.” Ick. “He said it was an admonition that in the coming world of machines, everyone needs to be vigilant how quickly pride disguises itself as advancement.”
Nick smacked his palm on the table. “Either he’s manipulating you or you’re manipulating me. Hattie told me about the same missing plaque months ago. It restated what Roosevelt said on his presidential trip here when I became the Teddy Stumper. He feared the Arroyo would be torn up for development.”
“I know, Nick, I know.” Ick. “He said, ‘what a splendid natural park you have right here! Oh, Mr. Mayor, don’t let them spoil that.’ The mystic forced me to memorize it.”
“Yeah, sure he did.” Nick whacked his hand onto the little table again, this time followed by Royo’s guttural growl of disapproval. “What game are you playing?”
“None,” she said, with an ick, ick kicker. “If I were deceiving you, it’d be less lurid than this. I may be impenetrable sometimes, but I’m not a liar. And there’s that I-love-you matter. Remember?”
“Course I do, Jules. But wouldn’t you be skeptical if you heard this from me?”
“Yes. Though you’d expect me to listen to everything. The Svengali, or whoever he was, stated if I declined the assignment, I’d never fulfill my potential, just as my father desired. He said I wouldn’t live to see the women’s right to vote come true, either, because I’d die in the throes of depression.”
“That’s it,” Nick said. “I can’t take another word. It’s too dark. Too implausible.” He rocketed up from the munchkin chair, poised to leave.
“Stop! If I’m so conniving, why would I have imperiled so much on this cursed metal?” She rose up, too, wiggling her fingers into the underside of the straw roof’s crunchy matting. In seconds, they extracted the plaque emblazoned with Roosevelt’s cautionary pearl. “See? I stashed it here until I formulated how to tell you.”
She sat down. Nick, frothing and befuddled, did, too. “Finish your story,” he said.
From her time around Millionaire’s Row, Jules said she’d whittled down a list of suspected plaque-stealers. The lock picking came elementarily after she’d read some Sherlock Holmes’ mysteries; learning when to break into those luxury properties was more nuanced. She needed to burglarize them when the women of the house were attending committee meetings—and Pasadena was a town with more committees than causes—their servants were out, and the children in school. Dogs always trusted her, so they never barked as she tiptoed about the premises.
Just the same, she claimed she was ready to quit, whatever the consequences. She’d second-guessed herself endlessly. Questioned if she were experiencing a nervous breakdown. Six times she’d snuck into houses, one late at night the morning before Nick played the docent on her Pasadena-history tour, and each time skulked out empty-handed.
“I tried deluding myself that the Svengali was a private detective that my father hired to scare me into returning to Chicago.” Ick. “But, Nick, he knew details about me no person possibly could.”
“Since he’s so omnipotent, why didn’t he snap his magic fingers to recover his stolen property?”
“You don’t think I asked him that in our single encounter?”
“And?” Nick said, fingers drumming an impatient beat.
“He said he’d chosen me because of my capacity to help ‘bring the world into the light from every bend in the road.’ I memorized that, as well.”
“Jesus Christ, this guy speaks absurdly, assuming he’s not imaginary.”
“He’s not. He’s real. Real as vapor can be, anyway.”
Two days before the bridge collapsed, Jules said she met an affluent contractor at an Ivy Wall social event that Adolphus earlier requested Lilly host. Burl Ingram sold the Mercereau Company some of its locally sourced cement. The uncouth man with bad breath asked her, after two glasses of champagne, with his homely wife ten feet away, if she was “as blonde below as she was above?” Jules said as tempted as she was to splash her drink on him, she felt a “bristling in my blood” that he was the culprit.
On the night the arch fell, she twisted in a Gordian knot. “I could obey my intuition, after learning Ingram had taken his family to San Francisco, or tend to you after your ordeal.” Ick. “You were in Fleet’s capable hands, so I left, feeling rotten about it.” She changed into her burglary get-up, a pair of black, baggy men’s clothes, and picked Ingram’s rear-door lock. Jackpot. She exhumed the plaque in a steamer trunk in the basement, underneath risqué photos of women wearing ostrich feathers over their erogenous zones. Ingram, the concrete monger, didn’t want people reading Roosevelt’s admonition about preserving nature.
“How convenient you found the thing beneath ostrich feathers,” Nick said tartly. “Is that also supposed to affect me?”
“No, it was intended to clue me in. I grilled the Svengali how I was supposed to contact him if I prevailed at his wild goose chase, and he informed me that we wouldn’t be meeting again. He said that I’d simply know in my heart to whom to give the plaque.”
“Don’t tell me: Upton Sinclair?”
“No, you, Nick. When we made love
here before, the plaque was over our heads and I felt a different bristling in my blood. The Svengali was using me to reach you.”
“Oh, I get it now. You were his middleman. What horse crap.”
“If I may, I prefer middlewoman. This is 1913,” she said, trying to cut the tension.
“Who cares what you may!” This time Nick left, walking outside for a lungful of Busch Gardens.
Jules chased him, snatching him by the hips. “Look into my eyes,” she said. Ick. “You’ll know I’m telling the truth, as outlandish as it sounds.”
But he wouldn’t look. He stomped a lap around the hut and repositioned himself in its doorframe. Royo himself was now outside, padding back and forth between him and Jules like a conflicted referee.
Nick sputtered air from his cheeks. “Final question: What was this Svengali’s name? Was it MZ, that Spring Street bastard I told you was attempting to hoodwink me? Sparkly eyes, a shiny suit? Think, Jules!”
“I, I don’t know,” she said, as she began crying while continuing to ick, ick. “Maybe. All those details, they just flittered away. He might’ve erased them to test my faith. No matter what I do to reassemble him,” ick, “I fall short.”
“You’re falling short—short on the credibility scale. I don’t believe there is any Svengali. You and Hattie aren’t conspiring to fleece me out of my inventions, are you? ”
You could see Jules recoiling before she exploded. “Go to hell, Nick!” she yelled. “How could you utter such an abomination? And what about the secrets you’re harboring? When I inquired about how you met Royo, you omitted telling me he saved your life. Fleet confided that. What else are you withholding, Mr. Honest?”
“Don’t make my dog a red herring,” he yelled back. “Was your dead-puppy story even true?”
Jules slapped him across the face so quickly that Nick barely registered her approaching hand. “Says the man who guzzles appropriated Budweiser; the man who never publicly confessed his role in releasing those noisy parrots.”