by Susan Wiggs
At least he could take comfort in the fact that she had fallen for his trick as well. Although he had wanted to stick around to see her reaction when she learned she had not, in fact, married the toast of Chicago, he knew the time had come to disappear. He was broke, he was in trouble, and hanging around this smoldering wreck of a city wouldn’t do him any good at all.
“Let’s see,” he said to his drinking partner. “I think the first one I married had it annulled when she found out my true age.”
“Why’d she do a thing like that?” Eugene Waxman, better known as Bull, had returned to the rail yard to hop a freighter out of town. He had encountered Dylan, who convinced him to delay his departure, have a drink and listen to his tale of woe.
They sat leaning against a stack of crossties at the waterfront, surveying the activity in the Illinois and Michigan Central yard. The string of cars with the Pullman had been moved aside and presumably forgotten. Dylan figured he could probably make use of the car until he decided where to go next.
He used to find this peripatetic way of life exciting, but lately the thought of embarking on yet another journey wearied him. Kathleen had been far too entertaining. Her absence left a shadowy hole in him.
“Well,” he said, thinking back to the chaotic years of his youth, “since the lady had two grown sons, she wasn’t thrilled to find herself wed to a fourteen-year-old.” He grinned crookedly at the expression on Bull’s face. “I’ve always looked mature for my age. Could raise a beard by the time I was thirteen.” The few days he had spent with that first wife—Mabel was her name—had been pleasant indeed. She had a decent income from her late husband’s property, and big white breasts as soft and fragrant as bread dough.
When she had discovered that he wasn’t twenty-one, as he’d claimed, she went off to puke into a chamber pot. She’d hired a discreet solicitor to quietly invalidate the marriage and then had engaged her largest son to send Dylan out of town wearing the livid stripes of a horsewhip on his back.
“Over the next few years I steered clear of marriage,” he admitted, passing the bottle to Bull. “But not women. Christ, who could give up women?”
“I hear you.” Nodding his great head, Bull took another swig.
“I promised to marry a couple of them, but I always escaped after I took what I needed.”
“Money, jewels, that sort of thing,” Bull said knowingly.
“Yeah.” Dylan was starting to like Bull. Nothing shocked him. Considering his past—a slave in Missouri, a fugitive in Illinois, a Chicago convict freed by the fire—he had seen a lot worse than a confidence game. “But I always made sure I left them with blissful memories.” Dylan was sincere in this. In the only way he knew how, he gave them what he could—physical pleasure, a few laughs, assurances that they were all stunningly beautiful. If they were hoping for anything more than that—and most women, annoyingly, were—they had to look elsewhere.
After that first fiasco, he should have stuck with married women and he should have worked alone—a bit of wisdom he’d learned the hard way. At the age of fifteen, he had fallen in with a gang run by a ruthless boss in New York City. He’d learned undetectable methods of picking pockets, all manner of sales swindles and shady games from “Honest John” to carnival roulette.
But he’d acquired the skills at a price. At the hands of a man named Lyle Watts, Dylan had discovered exactly how much torture the human spirit could endure. He had been pushed beyond his limit. He remembered Lyle’s scent of bay rum, the iron strength in his big hands and the suffocating quality of the darkness in which he imprisoned his prey. In exchange for the protection of his organization, the gang boss had forced Dylan to do things that even now, years later, made his guts twist and shrink with revulsion. In freeing himself of the painful grip of Lyle Watts, he had discovered his true talent. He was a gifted escape artist.
It was a skill that would serve him well in later years.
“Eventually, though, I did marry again,” he explained, brushing aside the tainted memories of gang life. “Twice. Three times, I guess, if you count Sunday night’s phony heiress.”
“Looked real enough to me,” Bull said unhelpfully. In the rail yard, workers hurried to and fro, switching tracks and getting ready for relief shipments from other cities. Watching them, Bull stroked his chin as if wishing for a shave. “Three times?”
“Yeah. The next was to a lady who died and left me a bit of money.” He could not say more, for he had no idea how to explain Cecilia. Lyle Watts had ordered him to woo and wed the delicate, consumptive woman who was doomed to die of her illness in a matter of months. Hardened by the Watts gang, Dylan figured Cecilia St. James for an easy mark. She lay bedridden, lacking a family and desperately lonely.
But she’d surprised him. Her huge eyes, staring out of her pale, wasted face, haunted him. At their very first meeting, she managed to break his heart. She inspired in him a fierce protectiveness that was as close to love as he had ever felt. He told Lyle he wanted to back out of the deal, but it was Cecilia who had been so insistent. And so, speaking vows in the shrouded silence of a sickroom, he had married her. A few months later, she died in his arms, whispering his name, never knowing the true reason he’d made her his wife.
He wished he had been more careful with her fortune. It was gone in six months, frittered away by failed schemes Lyle had cooked up.
Even the harsh lessons of gang life failed to wise him up, however, and he’d acquired another partner. In a saloon in the Bowery he had met Vincent Costello, the only mark ever to catch on to Dylan’s special method of shortchanging. Rather than take revenge on Dylan, Costello had proposed a partnership. Dylan had agreed, for Vince had seemed a kind mentor in contrast to Lyle. He was as smart and ruthless as any good con artist, but somehow managed to retain his humanity underneath. Dylan could see it when he spoke of his wife and daughter, claiming in all sincerity that he would die for them.
Dylan had been intrigued by the concept. He couldn’t imagine another person in his life being so important he would die for her.
“What about the next one?” Bull asked, clearly intrigued.
“Dinah.” Dylan giggled and drank some more. “I used to recite couplets because her name rhymes with—”
A shrill whistle pierced the air, and with a grinding of machinery, a train rolled in, its cars marked with the colophon of Cincinnati. Crates stenciled Relief Aid for Chicago and Catholic Relief were stacked high on the flatbed cars.
“So what about Dinah?” Bull asked, raising his voice to be heard over the chuffing of the locomotive.
“Richer than Croesus.”
“Who’s he?”
Dylan shrugged. “Some rich fellow.”
Dinah Galloway had treated him like a spoiled lapdog, lavishing him with attention, parading him out to social engagements so her friends could marvel at his dramatically handsome looks and fine manners. During this period, he had learned the ways of high society, quickly adopting the proper accent, mannerisms and sense of style exhibited by the old-money rich. He told people he had gone to Harvard, and they believed him because he knew the secret handshake of the Porcellian Club. He claimed ties to an old Boston family, inventing an impressive pedigree for himself. He effortlessly talked his way into the most exclusive men’s clubs and high-class parties in the city.
He might have gone on indefinitely pretending to belong to a society that would despise him if they knew his true background. For a while, he’d enjoyed the power and privilege of his status, the fine food and stylish clothing, the pretty French maids who let him tumble them in the linen closets of the Galloway mansion.
But Dinah Galloway became a leech upon his soul. Her demands and appetites challenged even his unusually broad experience in sexual matters. Since his initiation by Mabel, he had developed a number of proficiencies, often out of necessity. But his rich mistress’s craving for energetic, slightly violent sex always left him feeling odd and soiled. Her manic, ravenous needs drained him
in ways he had never imagined, and he found himself facing each day with dread and weariness.
At the first opportunity he had left, taking a good share of her jewelry with him. The marriage hadn’t been legal, anyway. Everything he had put on the marriage certificate had been a lie, including his name, his birthplace and where he’d been educated.
“She was too strange, even for me,” he said to Bull, and decided against elaborating. It was almost a relief to hook up with his old crony, Costello, again. By that time, Costello was widowed, his daughter grown and just out of parochial school.
“After leaving Dinah, my partner and I joined a revue—burlesque acts, performing animals, that sort of thing—based in Buffalo. I was the best escape artist, contortionist and daredevil in the show.”
“Best liar, too, I reckon.” Bull took a swig from the bottle and made a blissful face.
“I’m an excellent liar,” he admitted readily, “but not about the revue. Ever hear of the marquis de Bontemps?”
“Hell, yeah. Everybody’s heard of him. Crazy French fellow who crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope.”
Dylan grabbed the bottle and raised it in salute. “Le marquis, c’est moi,” he declared. “Huh?”
“I’m the marquis de Bontemps. Or was, until he retired.”
Bull narrowed his eyes. “Horseshit. They say he fell in and was never seen again.”
“Well, you’re looking at him now.”
Dylan vividly recalled the terror and bone-crushing ordeal of the most daring stunt of his career. It was supposed to have been his escape from Vincent Costello. The two of them had not been getting along, and Costello’s daughter Faith had added an uncomfortable element to the partnership.
Faith, a quiet, pious girl who was the apple of her father’s eye, had decided that she’d fallen in love with Dylan. He liked Faith and often felt a brotherly devotion to her, but love was something he neither understood nor believed in. When her thoughts turned to marriage, he had “fallen” into the churning rapids with most of their earnings wrapped in oilcloth and strapped to his belt, hoping he’d seen the last of Costello and Faith. The sweetness of freedom had been balm for the many wounds and bruises of the ordeal.
But on Sunday night, it had become clear that he’d misjudged his old partner, who was even more experienced and more unscrupulous than Dylan. Costello had tracked him down. Only the convenient timing of the fire had saved his skin.
Bull proved to be a pleasant and congenial drunk. He leaned back against the stack of beams and, within a few minutes, was snoring. In the distance, Dylan could see a group of patrolmen, hastily called up and deputized to guard the relief supplies. Despite the whiskey, he still had enough common sense to cover Bull with an old, half-burned saddle blanket he’d found somewhere, concealing the prison stripes. Then Dylan stood up, swaying a little as the bright inner fire of the whiskey lit his head.
He studied the empty bottle in his hand and tossed it away. It didn’t break on the sandy shore. Looking out across the rail yard, he spent a few blurry moments contemplating the Pullman where he and Kathleen had holed up to escape the fire.
The whiskey had failed to do its job, for a flood of inexcusably deep sentiments washed through him. That train car had been their hideaway, their private retreat from the world. For two days, his life had been more splendid than he had dared to believe life could be.
And like everything else, it was a sham. She was a counterfeit heiress who had wed a fraudulent bachelor under false pretenses. He wondered why he felt so betrayed, why he was taking it so hard. It wasn’t as if he had never been abandoned before, had never fled a risky situation or had to start over again. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t committed similar betrayals of his own.
Perhaps, he reflected woozily, the sting of betrayal came from the fact that Kathleen had reminded him that dreams sometimes did come true. But not his dreams. He was a fool to even consider the possibility.
For a long time he stood looking out at the lake, a vast fresh sea stretching out to eternity. Behind him, he could hear the noises of the rail yard. From the shouts and clamor, he gathered that more relief had come in, as well as firefighters and engineers from other cities. Before the fires were even out, Chicago was already rebuilding itself.
It was a concept Dylan could relate to.
He nudged at Bull with the toe of his shoe. Vaguely he recalled helping himself to the good leather shoes at a cobbler’s shop, blithely telling the proprietor to send a bill around to a false address. He wished all transactions could be so simple.
“Bull,” he said. “Time to go.”
Bull snorted in protest, but dragged his eyes open. At some point, and without much deliberation, Dylan had decided to travel with Bull for a while. The ex-convict was a man of few words, a trait Dylan deeply appreciated. Bull hadn’t asked too many questions about the situation with Kathleen. He was also intimidatingly huge, another useful quality when traveling to unknown places. “We’d better see what’s pulling out of here,” he suggested.
Bull nodded and stretched his enormous body, looking like the strong man in Phineas Barnum’s traveling revue. “Where to?” he asked.
“Let’s go see if we can find something bound for St. Louis. That’ll give us all the choices we need.”
“I ain’t going to the South,” Bull said.
“But it’s not—” Dylan stopped himself. He was wrong to expect Bull to return to a land that held such hellish memories for him, even if it was no longer legal to own slaves. Somewhere down in Missouri, on a farm, Eugene Waxman had lived in bondage to another man. Dylan didn’t blame him for never wanting to return. He knew all about running from nightmares. “We’ll head west, then. Maybe get ourselves all the way to California.”
“California.” Bull tasted the word, then nodded his head. “All right.” He stared out across the churning lake. “I did like Chicago, though.”
“So did I.”
They went over to one of the trains, where the unloading had almost finished. A knot of people stood about. Dylan hung back. He and Bull would wait until the empty train pulled out, then hop into an untended car. Acrid smoke huffed into the air, and the smell of hot steel wafted from the tracks.
“Say farewell to Chicago, my friend,” Dylan said.
Bull hesitated, studying the crowd. He stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Don’t you think,” he remarked, “that you should say goodbye to your wife first?”
Dylan frowned, turning to Bull. “What—ah, hell.”
Moving through the crowd, like a ship with emerald-green sails unfurled, Kathleen O’Leary bore down on them.
* * *
The long trek through the ruins had put Kathleen in high dudgeon. Her family had not allowed her to wallow in misery for long. She knew better than to let something as trivial as a broken heart hold her back. A lively talk from her mother had filled her with determination to keep what was hers by right—Dylan Kennedy.
Her mother had hastily brushed the green silk gown and had mended the more obvious tears and holes, declaring that Kathleen should dress the part of the lady she had become by marrying him. No O’Leary would allow herself to be abandoned by a man, her mother had said.
Kathleen had embraced the notion and set out on her own. She had not expected to find him, but here he was, near the rail yard where she had become his wife in every sense of the word. By the time she found him, she was in a fury.
And he was reeling drunk. She could tell, even from a distance, for she was an Irishwoman with a sense about such things. She recognized the slack insolence of his grin, the negligent but unsteady grace with which he held himself.
She barely acknowledged Bull with a curt nod. He wisely stepped out of the way, seeming to guess she did not wish to be trifled with.
She made straight for Dylan. But the moment she stopped in front of him, all the angry words she’d stored up deserted her.
He doffed an imaginary hat. “Ah, my litt
le fortune hunter is back. What is it you require? More compliments on your artful maneuvering? More applause for your finesse at deception?” Before she could duck away, he chucked her under the chin, his touch deceptively gentle. He smiled coldly down at her. “I was fooled from the very first moment I saw you, love. Did you know that?”
“You’re drunk,” she said uselessly.
“But that will pass.” He walked down to the lakeshore as if taking a casual stroll along the beach. “Being a lying, cheating, gold-digging little swindler won’t,” he called over his shoulder.
She flinched, having no choice but to follow him. “Dylan.” She swallowed, stung by the idea that he could so easily dismiss the past few days. She wanted to find the man who had shown her the world from a balcony, proposed to her on bended knee, married her in the midst of disaster, then taken her to bed where he had introduced her to wonders beyond imagining. “You must give me a chance to explain.”
“Ah, no.” Without slowing his pace, he held up a hand to stop her. “Don’t be like the magician revealing his secrets. You’ll spoil the elegance of your ruse.”
“It wasn’t a ruse.” She forced herself to step in front of him and look up into his cold, narrowed eyes. “Not in the way you think. And, anyway, what started out as a prank became something…real.”
“As real as your banking fortune,” he scoffed. “Step aside. I wish to take a walk. Alone.”
She let him pass, but continued walking at his side. The chill gray water bit at the shore littered with charred debris from the fire. “Didn’t our whirlwind courtship, our wedding vows, our—” she blushed to remind him “—our um, honeymoon, mean a thing to you? Only yesterday, you swore you loved me.”
He fell silent, and just for a heartbeat, she dared to hope she had reached a core of decency inside him. “Did I?” he said. “Fancy that.” Then he burst out laughing, although his laughter had a bitter edge. “Tell me, what was your game before? Were you an actress?”