For a long time he lay stunned, listening to a scuffling, and then, as from a great distance in the dark, a fleshy pale image like a blurred cameo drifted toward him, out of focus, sliding away from resolution, but finally he willed his brain to fix the vision and it was the bright face of a strangely wise-looking baby girl with soft cheeks and long lashes, and he felt himself running through the dark faster and faster, breathing through his mouth and moaning out loud until he woke up coughing on vomit, a doctor rolling him onto his side and his face plunging into boiled hospital sheets, a nurse coming toward him with a porcelain pan while a bright window beyond her absorbed the dissolving jewel of the child’s face.
Chapter Four
FOUR DAYS AFTER he’d entered the hospital, he woke with a spinning head and saw his wife, Linda, sitting in a white enamel chair stitching a large canvas of needlepoint. He watched her a moment before he spoke to make sure she was real and not one of the dreams that had been haunting him. He blinked. It was stolid Linda, red hair, milk white complexion, her fingers working needlepoint chair bottoms she sold to a furniture store uptown.
When he spoke her name, she lifted her head and said, “Do you remember what happened?”
It was like her to check to see if something, in this case his memory, might be broken. He wondered if she’d throw him away if he couldn’t think anymore. But after a moment, he decided he could, and told her, “I’m all right. I remember.”
She leaned in close and studied his eyes, kissing his forehead as she would a feverish child. “I’ll call for the doc to look at you in a minute.” She helped him sit up, and his head began to clear. He then told her about that day in the store, carefully working in all the details, placing them for her like delicate items on a shelf.
“Well,” she said, brushing his hair back. “That’s pretty much the way Mr. Krine told it to me when he came by to fire you.”
He looked down at his arms, as though he still expected to be wearing his floorwalker’s suit. “What for?”
Her eyebrows arched, and she looked at him as if he’d just asked what the sun was. “Why, for losing that little girl.”
He thought about this. For Mr. Krine there was no substitute for performance. If something went wrong, it was the employee’s fault. Always. “How did they get away with her?”
“They left you out cold in the dressing room, came downstairs with the child dressed as a sleeping boy and walked right through the doors before the staff got the order from Mr. Krine himself to lock them.” She leaned around and inspected the back of his head. “Nobody found you for half an hour. When they saw all the stuff in the dressing room, they figured out what happened. The parents were really upset, Lucky. They said they should’ve got more help from the store. They’ve been by here every day with a policeman wanting to ask you questions. Mr. Krine’s afraid they’ll try to sue.”
“What else could I have done?” But even as he said this, he knew the answer. He’d ignored Mr. Krine’s rule: If a child was missing in-store for more than fifteen minutes, the floorwalker on duty was responsible for making sure all the doors were locked.
His wife walked back to her chair. “Whatever needed to be done, you didn’t do it.”
“I tried my best.” He turned his face to the wall, wondering if this was true.
“That’s what the mezzanine attendant and the candy girl said.” She glanced up at him, then returned to her needlework. “You sure have a lot of lady friends.”
“Linda, three-quarters of the staff’s ladies.”
She drew her work close. “The city cops said you should’ve called them first off.”
He groaned and slid down in the sheets. “City cops wouldn’t come for a kid lost in a store.”
“I realize that. But because things turned out bad, you know, after the fact, they’re all down on you.”
“They want Krine to hire one of their patrolmen on his off-hours.”
She squinted and drew a stitch. “They do carry guns.”
“I’ve got a little gun in the store safe,” he said weakly, knowing he would never have used it. After his experience in the war, he wanted nothing further to do with guns.
Linda shrugged.
He watched her push her needle up and through the pattern, one he recognized from other chair seats, of an eighteenth-century dandy bowing before his reluctant lady. Her work was beautiful and earned decent money, and he was glad of it.
***
TWO DAYS LATER he went to the store, and Mr. Krine gave him a week’s pay along with a lecture. Sam was hoping for a little mercy, but it was a faint hope at best; he’d seen several employees walk out of Krine’s flashy doors holding their final pay envelopes because of lesser mistakes.
He stood in front of the mahogany desk in the owner’s office. “How can I come back? I like the job.”
Mr. Krine was looking up a phone number, already finished with him. “If you find that little girl you can have your job back.”
Sam glanced at the family photograph on Mr. Krine’s desk showing his well-dressed offspring, all of them working in the store. “You have any idea how I might do that?”
Mr. Krine kept his eyes on the phone as he drew it toward him. “You could use all the free time you have.”
***
SIX BLOCKS FROM THE STORE was the precinct station on Chartres, and he dawdled through the steamy morning, breathing a nimbus of horse droppings and cigarette butts sopping in the gutters and sewer gas crawling out of the storm drains. He kept back from the curb as the Model T’s and fruit wagons splashed down toward the market.
Coming into the station house’s lobby, a large open space with wedding-cake plaster on its ceiling, he saw Sergeant Muscarella writing in a ledger, the white dome of his bald head bobbing away under a shivering lightbulb. Last year he was on foot patrol in Sam’s neighborhood, but then he had donated a month’s pay to the new mayor’s campaign fund.
“Mr. M.”
Muscarella raised his gray face from the ledger. “Eh, Lucky, you got out the hospital.” The sergeant’s eyes, watching him with detachment, were olives left too long in the jar.
“Yeah. I still got the headache real bad.” He touched his forehead. “You heard anything about that little girl?”
The sergeant laid his pen in the crack of the ledger. “You know, somebody steals a coat, he’ll sell it or wear it. We can kind of guess where to look. But when somebody steals a kid, what do you do?”
“You sent people to the stations?”
“Yeah, sure. But nowadays they coulda used a car.” He shrugged. “They coulda left on a ship. They could even still be in town, you know.”
“If you hear anything, I’m in the book.”
Muscarella’s face twitched unpleasantly. “Lucky, why you worried about this? You not a cop.”
He looked at the quarter-sawn oak wall panels behind the sergeant’s bench, carved sections that rose up around the policeman like a little throne. He decided not to tell him about the pale cameo floating nightly behind his eyelids, the injured girl he left behind in France, his dead son, or his stolen family. He looked down at his shoes, understanding that the policeman didn’t need the complicated truth. He needed a reason. “Sal, I got fired because of this mess. Krine said he might hire me back if I found the kid.”
The sergeant shrugged. “Lucky, floorwalker’s not much of a job for somebody like you.”
“I like it. The pay’s not bad and I can move up some, maybe manage a department.”
“Well, if you that hard up, I can get you on as a bank guard.”
He looked up and shook his head.
The sergeant picked up his pen. “I guess you’re not the shootin’ kind.”
“Even my wife says I’m responsible for the little girl.”
Muscarella ranged his dark eyes over him. “What you say?”
He put his hands in his pockets. “I say I wish it’d been my day off.”
The sound of an argument rolled up the
steps outside and the double doors burst open with two small cops fighting a two-hundred-pound whore, her red face rising angry as a boil out of a white feather boa.
***
HE SPENT THE DAY looking for work at the other big stores downtown. At suppertime he stepped off the streetcar and walked under the live oaks and over the root-buckled sidewalks to his shotgun on Camp Street. Looking forward to playing into the evening on his piano, he stopped half a block away and pushed back his straw boater when he saw a man and a woman sitting on the porch with his wife. He put his head down and walked up.
His wife’s voice carried a forced lightness. “Lucky, these are the Wellers, Ted and Elsie.”
“I know. How are you?” He noticed the mother’s lips were determined today, pressed tight. Ted, a thick, balding fellow with a short mustache, held out his hand for Sam’s and clasped it with surprisingly long fingers. After Sam sat down in a straight-back chair, the couple told him they’d been to every precinct house in town and explained they were musicians working on a Stewart Line excursion steamer come down from Cincinnati.
Sam nodded. “One of the big dance boats.”
“The Excelsior,” Ted said. “Elsie and me were in town shopping, you know, getting some fresh duds for a new act. That’s what we were doing when our girl got taken.” He looked away, his eyes reddening.
Elsie leaned into the conversation. “The boat’s getting laid up for a couple months for new boilers and hull work. The company’s going to put us on another boat they just bought from the St. Paul Line. It’s tied up south of town, but until it leaves we’re spending every spare minute looking for her.”
Sam closed his eyes for a second and saw the little girl. “Her name’s Lily, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Elsie put a hand to her mouth.
He looked uncomfortably from one to the other, not knowing what to say or ask in a situation like this. Finally, he said, “She is your blood child, right? There’s no ex-spouses involved, is there?”
Ted frowned. “She’s our natural child. And we’ve thought about everybody we know and can’t come up with a soul who’d want to make off with her.”
Sam leaned back, listening to the chair creak underneath him. “Well, I’m not surprised.”
“Why do you say that?” Elsie asked, her hand still next to her mouth.
“The woman I saw didn’t look like anybody who’d wanted a pretty little girl. She was old and had seen a lot of hard times. I just caught a glimpse, but her hair was oily-looking and I think, let’s see now”-he closed his eyes again-“she was missing a front tooth.”
“Oh,” Elsie said, “she sounds awful.”
“Did you see the one who hit you?” her husband asked.
“No, but the bastard-excuse me-he sure knew where to pop me. If you think about it, considering the chloroform and all, it’s like somebody hired those people to steal her. They were just too good at it. They’d planned it all out.”
For a long moment everyone on the narrow wood porch seemed to be thinking about what he’d said. In the next block, the clipped yells of a neighborhood baseball game swelled up and died off. Sam was imagining the one bottle of beer at the bottom of the cooler, next to the block of ice.
Ted moved uneasily in his chair. “It doesn’t make sense for someone to hire a thief.”
“I don’t know. Tell me something about her.”
The Wellers exchanged looks.
“Well,” the husband began, “about two months ago we brought her into the act. She’s only three and a half, but she’s smarter than the two of us multiplied together. The child can remember at least a couple verses of a dozen different songs. When she sings, you can see the music in the way she moves.”
Elsie straightened her back. “She’s got this voice that’s very accurate for a child. Good volume, too.”
“I taught her how to dance a little while she sings,” Ted bragged. “We’re part of the big orchestra that the Stewart Line hires, but we only use Lily in two ensemble pieces per set, and the audiences go crazy for her.” He looked up and narrowed his eyes. “A lot of people have watched her perform since we left Cincinnati four weeks ago.”
“Three and a half and she can do all that?” Sam looked at his wife. “I’d steal her myself.”
The parents both looked glumly at the street.
During the next half hour he told the Wellers how sorry he was several times, but they didn’t make a move to get up. Finally, the street began to darken and he pulled out his watch. “You know, I’ve got to go in now.”
Ted also pulled a pocket watch from his vest but wound it without checking the time. “You’re the only one who saw the ones that took her. The cops at the Third District said you’re real smart. You can figure all the angles here.”
Sam felt sorry for them, but had no idea of how to help. His brief stay in France had instilled in him the understanding that the world presents unsolvable tragedies at every turn. “I don’t know what to do for you.”
Lightning bugs began to come out of the streetside privet, sparking on and off like flickering hopes.
At last, Elsie stood up. “We’re sorry you got fired.”
“Me too.”
“What will you do?”
He smiled up at her in spite of himself. “I guess I’ll think about some of those angles.”
***
LATER, after supper, Linda opened the beer and poured it into two glasses. Sam walked through the little parlor and picked up a small framed photograph of an infant dressed in baptismal clothes. They went back out onto the porch and sat in the night’s breath coming up from the river. He held the photograph in one hand and rubbed a thumb back and forth across the glass.
Linda touched his arm. “Are you thinking of how to help them?”
“I’m thinking, all right.” There were people missing in his life like big holes cut out of the night sky, and Sam felt powerless to do anything about it. He was only one person in a planet full of incomplete seekers, and now the Wellers had joined him.
Chapter Five
IT HAD BEEN TWO WEEKS since they’d seen the Wellers. Right after a thunderstorm had tortured the neighborhood with sizzling bolts, Sam and his wife were looking through the window screen at the water standing in their small bricked yard. He felt like a piece of wreckage left behind by the wind. Between them on the table was a small loaf of French bread showing a flame of desiccated ham. No lettuce or tomato, no mayonnaise. They were out of everything and the rent was due. They owned only an old Dodge automobile and their clothes. Linda had spent her needlepoint money on the telephone bill, electricity, gasoline. Sam imagined she had a jar of quarters somewhere but never asked about it, for fear it didn’t exist. The dry sandwich lay between them like a signal.
“Well, I guess I better go see Muscarella and sign up with the bank militia.”
She looked at him. “My brother can get you on at the railroad.”
“Switchman?”
“Yes.”
“Your brother with three fingers missing? Or your brother with a thumb cut off?”
She sliced the sandwich in half and pushed the larger portion toward him. “You’re more careful.”
“Linda, there’s not a man in your family that can play the piano.”
She bit at her part of the sandwich, twisting on it. “Well, go on downtown, then. And please find something.”
***
THAT DAY and the following, he walked the twenty blocks downtown to look for work in the stores. He went on foot to loosen up his legs, he told himself, but in fact he wanted to save the seven cents’ street-car fare. On the second day, halfway to Canal Street, he didn’t know why, some little spark of curiosity or sense of purpose overtook him at Lee Circle and he changed direction toward the river, wondering what he was doing as he walked into the smell of burning coal and roasting coffee. From the foot of Canal he could see a big Stewart Line excursion boat riding high in a dry dock across the river, its paddle wheel disma
ntled, its rusty stacks laid out on the deck. He caught the Algiers ferry, which cost him seven cents, and from the landing walked down a dirt lane to the shipyard. A watchman told him that most of the boat’s crew and performers had been put up in the Gardenia Hotel. He counted out five Indian-head pennies and two Lincolns, took the next boat across, and walked through the French Quarter to the hotel, a place he knew was frequented by vaudevillians and traveling salesmen. He arrived tired and thirsty, the bottoms of his feet burning in his shiny floorwalker’s shoes, and he paused on the sidewalk across from the Gardenia, examining the pressed-tin roof frieze that pretended to be stone, the copper-sheeted bay windows that hung over the street like ingots, showing a thinly deceptive elegance.
The desk clerk rang the Wellers’ room, and the wife said her husband was out but she would come right down, so Sam waited in the illusory lobby with its puddled curtains and genteel walnut settees and side tables. He knew what the rooms were like, small and hot and plain as toast. He heard Elsie on the stairs before he saw her, and her steps were slow. She joined him on a green plush sofa, sitting down quickly, perhaps pretending not to notice a polite scattering of dust rising from the cushions.
“Do you have any news?” she asked. She was composed and did not smile at him.
He shook his head, once. “I’ve been going around town trying to find a job that won’t maim me or drive me crazy or get me arrested.” He watched her face, but she seemed unconcerned about what he’d said. He knew what she wanted to hear. “While I was out and about, I did what I could. Checked with the porters at the stations. Visited some hotels and the one criminal I know.”
She still did not smile. Out in the street the vegetable man’s wagon passed by, his falsetto rising about the glories of tomatoes and plums, “Ahh gotta da bannannnn…,” but her gaze didn’t stray toward the window. “We’ve paid a private policeman to investigate Lily’s disappearance, but he’s turned up nothing. I don’t think he really cares about her, just our money.” She didn’t say this in a bitter voice, and he was glad of it. His uncle had taught him that bitterness solved nothing. “I don’t suppose you have children,” she continued. “I didn’t see any sign of them at your house.”
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