The Girl in the Glass

by Jeffrey Ford

  The next morning, Antony got me up early and took me out driving in the Cord. In broad daylight, the car looked pretty good, considering it had been in the middle of a shoot-out the night before. There were three bullet holes in the left side, a broken window, and the spare needed to be fixed. Antony said he'd take it later that day and get the work done.

  "Kid, you drive like an old lady," he said when he finally deemed my driving abilities worthy of leaving the driveway and going out on the road.

  I drove nervously, hunched over the steering wheel, eyes darting right and left. "I'm not used to it," I said.

  "Takes time. This car knows the way to go, though. You just put it in gear and put your foot on the gas. Loosen up a little and let it roll."

  By midday I was zipping along the roads of the North Shore.

  "Okay," said Antony, "I'm bored. Take it back. You're not thrilling me with the short stops and gear crunching anymore."

  "Antony," I said. "I'm leaving tomorrow for Mexico."

  He took out a cigarette and lit it. "I know," he said.

  "What am I going to do without you?" I asked.

  "Fuck up, more than likely," he said.

  "How am I going to contact you? Schell said you're going to California."

  "Yeah," he said. "Before you go, I'm going to give you a phone number. If you ever need me, call it. An old woman will answer. Tell her who you are and leave a number and I'll get back to you."

  "I'm going to miss you," I said.

  "Don't worry, kid. You'll get over it." He said nothing else but just kept smoking his cigarette. When we pulled back in the driveway at the house, he got out without a word and went inside.

  The next morning, the car was ready to go. Isabel and I packed it with blankets and food and whatever else we would need for the long journey. Schell suggested we cross the border in Texas in as remote a spot as possible. He handed me a huge wad of bills and told me it was my cut of all the jobs we had worked. I was dressed in one of Schell's best suits, and Morgan had given Isabel the paisley wrap to wear. We said our good-byes in the house. Morgan kissed us both and started to cry. Antony shook my hand and said, "Don't take any wooden nickels."

  Schell followed us out to the Cord. He held the door for Isabel as she got in and kissed her through the open window. Then he came around to my side and said, "Once you get set up down there, I'll be in touch."

  "How?" I asked.

  "I have connections," he said.

  "I want to tell you-" I began, but he cut me off by saying, "Time to go." He backed away from the car, and I started it. Pulling out of the driveway, I almost hit a tree but managed to right the back end at the last second. Then we were in the road and driving away.

  The Cord didn't make it all the way to Mexico but crapped out somewhere around Phoenix, where we boarded a bus for the remainder of the journey. The trip was an adventure, worthy of a book itself. Isabel helped me relearn Spanish as we traveled across the United States. We saw a lot of places hit hard by the Depression, a lot of people scrabbling to survive, and we felt lucky to have money and a destination, a home to return to.

  Antony was right, I'd gotten over leaving him and Schell behind as I fell, every day, deeper in love with Isabel. Sometimes, on those open country roads, while the Cord was still running, and Isabel's head lay on my shoulder, I'd open it up all the way, and heading straight into the future, with the wind rushing in the window, I'd feel like I was born anew, never having known anything about the con.

  WAIT, THERE'S MORE

  As Isabel had said, when she told me the story of the ghost in the silver mine and I thought it was just about over: "Wait, there's more."

  We settled in Mexico City and got a small apartment in the Polanco section. It wasn't difficult to find work, as Isabel and I were bilingual, and we labored as translators for anything from business documents to minor literary works. Through relatives who still lived in the country, Isabel was able to locate her father, a mild-mannered and jovial old man, who came and lived with us in the city. He served as a witness and sole guest at our wedding.

  Once we had established ourselves more securely, I took some of the money Schell had given me and whatever we could save and put it toward tuition at the University of Mexico. There I studied literature, and my early tutors would have been proud of my accomplishments. After many years of working and studying, with great support from Isabel, I managed to acquire a doctorate. Even better, I was offered a position at the university and wound up teaching all of those works I'd studied when I was younger and, even more satisfying, the great writings of my own people. It was a heady time for us, and life happened fast and happened faster. During these years Schell and Antony were never far from my mind, and sometimes I had the greatest longing to see them again, to know how they were, to tell them how happy I was. Every day when the post arrived, I'd search for a letter, even just a postcard, but nothing ever came.

  World War II started. During those dark years and for many following Captain Pierce's words returned to me time and again. The Monster had risen. I knew, as many did not, that the grim protocols of Adolf Hitler, a horrifying program of genocide, had been germinated in the United States by "great men" the likes of Henry Ford and the disreputable, crackpot findings of the Eugenics Record Office. And as time progressed, I could see that even the scale of this atrocity would not satisfy the Monster, but that it would return time and again to haunt humanity.

  In 1946, after Isabel herself had graduated university with a degree in mathematics, we had our first child, a boy we named Antonio, of course, after Mr. Cleopatra. Our second son, Diego, was born two years later. During this time of young parenthood, I'd wished to have some contact with Schell, as most people want to speak to their parents when they, themselves, become parents. I tried to locate him, but to no avail.

  The years followed one after the other, like a string of scarves from the great Saldonica's breast pocket. One night in 1965, the year I turned fifty, the year my younger son was seventeen, the age I was when I'd left Schell, Diego was rummaging around our attic and found the suit Schell had given me to wear on the long-ago escape to Mexico.

  He came downstairs and handed me a slip of paper folded in half, saying "I found this in the pocket." I opened the yellowed note and there was a phone number written out in Antony's oddly delicate hand. I remembered him saying, "Call it. An old woman will answer. Tell her who you are…and I'll get back to you." I smiled at the sight of it and had a halfhearted notion to dial until I realized that any woman who was old in '32 would now be long dead. Instead, I folded it and shoved it into my wallet behind a tattered and creased photograph of Schell and Antony standing beside the Cord, a lifetime ago.

  Later that year, I was in California, at Berkeley, participating in a weeklong academic conference called Literature of the Americas. I spent the first evening drinking and gabbing with colleagues I'd not seen in a few years; by the second night I'd already begun to miss Isabel and our sons and stayed to myself in the hotel room, watching television and reviewing a paper I was to deliver the next morning. At one point I opened my wallet to retrieve my photo of her, clumsily knocking loose all of the photos, which scattered on the table. With them came that slip of paper. I don't know what got into me-curiosity? loneliness?-but I dialed the number. There were five rings, and I was about to hang up, when an old woman answered.

  "What's your name?" she croaked.

  "Diego," I said.

  She asked for my phone number, repeating each numeral as I uttered it. Then, without another word, she hung up. I was bemused and never really expected to receive a call back. It was not until I was in bed, at around one in the morning, that the phone rang.

  "Hello?" I said into the receiver, my mind fuzzy from sleep.

  "What's up, kid," said Antony. I sat up straight, instantly wide awake, and burst out laughing to hear his familiar voice.

  "Throw some sawdust under it," he said. "Where are you?"

  I told him
about the conference. He told me, "Ditch that bullshit and come see me." He gave me directions and a phone number, and then hung up without further discussion.

  As soon as I finished my lecture the next morning, I ducked out of the conference and rented a car. He lived not too far away, up in the hills outside Berkeley. It was early afternoon when, after getting lost a few times, I pulled into the drive of a house that sat alone atop a wooded hill.

  I knocked on the front door, and a young Mexican woman answered. She introduced herself as the housekeeper, Marta, and showed me to a patio set away from the back of the house, at the edge of the hill, which offered a breathtaking view of the valley below. Antony was sitting in a wicker chair, beneath a grape arbor facing the vista. In front of him was a glass-topped wicker table holding an ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, and a beer can.

  "Antony," I cried, and he turned and smiled. Unlike most people who shrink with age, he was still a giant. His face was etched with wrinkles, and he'd lost some hair; what remained had gone white. But his eyes were still a piercing blue, as sharp and alert as ever.

  "Kid, you gonna make me get up or what?" he said.

  I walked over to him and gave him a hug. He enclosed me in one of his huge arms, and his incredible strength was still evident. He waved to the chair opposite him and I took a seat. The first words out of my mouth were, "What happened to you guys?"

  He told me how he'd come out to California, decided the climate suited him just fine, and never looked back-except to send for Vonda the Rubber Lady, who joined him as soon as he said the word. Although they never married, they had a good life together, starting a profitable business cultivating marijuana. "Didn't I ever tell you I always wanted to be a farmer?" he asked. After Vonda died of cancer in 1956, Antony retired on the considerable sum he and Vonda had managed to stash away. Now, he said, he was just as happy to sit in the sun, sip a cold one, and daydream.

  Next it was my turn to fill him in on what Isabel and I had done with our lives.

  "That's great, kid," he said. "Schell would be proud of you."

  "Antony," I said, "I'm fifty and you're still calling me kid."

  "Fifty, Christ, that's child's play. Try out my age for a while. I feel like a three-hundred-pound meat loaf. My brain hasn't done an honest day's work in years."

  "And Schell?" I asked.

  Antony took a deep drag on his cigarette and shook his head. "I'm sorry, kid. Right after you left and I took off for California, he and Morgan bought the farm. They'd stayed too long at the old house. It burned to the ground one night, with them in it. The police said it was arson, because the fire was so hot the bodies were burned beyond recognition."

  I hadn't been prepared to hear that Schell had died. I'd hoped that Antony would tell me where to find him. I felt like weeping, but I didn't.

  Antony continued, his eyes gazing out across the valley, his voice oddly hollow. "No one was ever charged. I know who it was, though."

  I knew he was referring to the Monster and the people behind Agarias. And I knew that even then, more than thirty years later, the Monster still lived. "Schell was a great guy," I said. "He saved my life when he took me in."

  "Yeah," said Antony. "And luckily you were able to repay the favor that crazy night out in Fort Solanga."

  "Have you ever wondered about the girl in the glass?" I asked.

  Antony leaned forward in his chair. "I think about it almost every day," he said. "There's something I've wanted to ask you for years. The ghost Schell saw…"

  "Charlotte Barnes," I said.

  "You had nothing to do with that, did you?" he said and smiled.

  "Are you joking?" I asked.

  "Nah," he whispered and got that far-off look in his eyes again.

  "So, I guess it was a real ghost."

  "Maybe."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Do you remember the shape Schell was in just before that whole mess?" said Antony. "Moping around like he had a load in his pants? He was a good con man, but not a great con man. He wasn't ruthless enough. He had all the tricks, all the techniques, the facility for it. That part, if you'll excuse the expression, was in his blood. But he never really had the heart for it. He was trying so hard to convince himself that he was callous because that's the way his old man had been."

  "Well if it wasn't a ghost, what the hell was it?" I asked.

  He took a sip of his beer, squinted in the setting sun, and said, "Sometimes I think it was Schell."

  "You mean he was seeing things because he was depressed?"

  "Not exactly. When I left the East Coast he took me to the train station. It was the last I ever saw him. We were standing on the platform, waiting for the train to pull in, and I asked him about the ghost, 'cause, you know, it had never been resolved. Here's what his last words were to me before I got on board: 'The girl in the glass? She was always there, my friend. I just never had a good enough reason to notice her before.'"

  "What was the reason?" I asked.

  "I think it was you," he said. "I think it was you."

  I sat in silence for a long time, stunned by the implications of Antony's theory, until I finally blurted out, "You mean he conned us?"

  The big man wheezed with laughter and nodded. "He didn't want you to follow in his footsteps. He wanted something better for you. But he knew you wouldn't get it simply because he told you. So he mixed things up. The girl in the glass was the grain of sand in the oyster, the wrench in the gearworks, the mutation compounded over time, as he used to say about the spots on those fucking butterflies of his.

  "Oh, I'm not sayin' he knew anything about Charlotte Barnes's murder before we all did. I think he must've made up the story about seeing the ghost of a little girl, just to toss the dice, and then BAM! Five days later…"

  "He almost got us all killed," I said, smiling.

  "Yeah, tell me that wouldn't have been a bitch. Sometimes, though, kid, you gotta do what you gotta do. That's the long and short of it."

  By now the sun had nearly set; a sliver of orange stretched across the deep purple horizon before winking out. I didn't talk for a while but stared off into the twilight, trying to rekindle faded memories of the whole affair.

  "Look, Diego, it's just a theory. No need to get morose. I'm half senile as it is."

  All through the day Marta had been replenishing our beers. And although I hadn't had a cigarette in years, I smoked close to a pack that day. I stopped drinking at around eight o'clock and didn't leave till after midnight. By the time I got up to go, Antony had fallen asleep in his chair. I wrote out my address and phone number on an empty matchbook and gave it to Marta, telling her if he ever needed anything to call me. She promised me she would.

  Before the year was out, Marta called me in Mexico. Antony had died suddenly, quietly, while sitting in his chair, overlooking the valley. I caught a flight, rented a car, and once again found myself lost in the hills. By the time I found the little funeral parlor where the wake was being held, the viewing hours were just about over. I jumped out of my car and ran up the steps. The last of the mourners were leaving, save one old man who sat, head bowed, in the last row of seats in the small room.

  I stepped up to the large coffin and gave myself over to memories of my youth with Antony and Schell-the cons, the marks, the tricks. He lay there like he was carved from limestone, big and powerful even in death. Eventually, I touched his shoulder and said, "Okay, Antony," but before I turned away, I noticed something lying on the dark green satin liner, tucked in the corner to the right of his head. I leaned over and saw it was a playing card, turned facedown. My hand trembled as I reached for it. Flipping it over, I discovered the ace of hearts.

  A sudden strong breeze, as if someone had thrown open a door, startled me, and I turned to see who was there, but the door was closed and the place was empty. That's when I noticed it fluttering above the center aisle, a simple pine white, like some ghost of a memory come to life.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
<
br />   Whenever a writer delivers to his readers a novel that is set in a distinct historical period, as The Girl in the Glass is set in 1932 America, there is usually a good measure of research that has gone into the effort. Please keep in mind that I don't claim to be an historian. In other words, I never let the facts get in the way of following the fiction where it demands to go, but, that said, I did delve into many sources in the course of writing this book. I list some of them below, not to act the scholar, but I believe readers might be discovering one or two of the historical actualities presented herein for the first time and will want to investigate them further on their own.

  Anyone interested in the concept of spiritualism as a con would do well to read the work of James Randi, internationally renowned magician and escape artist. He has a long list of very fine titles and is an engaging writer who rarely fails to amaze with his insight as to how less-than-reputable practitioners of the supernatural dupe their customers. The particular work of his I found most useful on this subject was Flim-Flam: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. In addition to Randi, one can turn to the writings of the great Houdini himself, who penned a number of books, some of which remain in print, that dissect spiritualist techniques.

  Before investigating the 1930s, I was unaware of the Mexican Repatriation that went on during that decade in the United States. In the 1920s and earlier many immigrants were welcomed into this country in order to serve as cheap labor for building the railroads and harvesting crops in western and southern states. With the onset of the Great Depression, though, the growing economic problems of the country and those in positions of power responsible for them found a scapegoat in immigrants. Many legal as well as illegal Mexican immigrants, along with children born in the United States, were forcibly deported back to Mexico. For an easily accessible and excellent essay on this subject, seek out Dr. Jorge L. Chinea's "Ethnic Prejudice and Anti-Immigrant Policies in Times of Economic Stress: Mexican Repatriation from the United States, 1929-1939" on the web at