“You’ll take all my paint off,” Evie said, angling her face away. The dreaded headache had started. “I don’t understand why Will had this letter. He told you he didn’t know your mother.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” Sam said. “This was in a collection of Rotke’s books. Maybe she was the one who knew my mother. I just hope Anna Polotnik can supply the answers. Once I find her.” Sam tucked the envelope back into his pocket, along with the handkerchief. “One more thing—now that you’ve got two nights a week on the radio, it sure would be swell if you could talk up the Diviners exhibit.”
“WGI and Pears soap don’t pay me to shill for the Creepy Crawly, Sam.”
“Just work it into the act: ‘All ghosts swear by Pears! The cleanest ghosts in town will be attending the Diviners exhibit at the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult!’”
“Sam, how is it that you can take a perfectly ordinary day and turn it crossways?” Evie asked, rubbing her temples.
Sam grinned and spread his hands wide. “Everybody’s got a talent, kid.”
Mildred knocked again. “Miss O’Neill? Will you be much longer?”
“That’s your cue to leave,” Evie said, pushing Sam toward the door. “Don’t forget about our date tonight—the party at the Pierre Hotel hosted by some rich Texan who made all his money in oil. He’s swimming in it—money, not oil. It’s good press.”
Sam winked. “Well. As long as it’s good press. See you tonight, doll.”
“Lucky me,” Evie said, and for a second Sam couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not.
Sam turned up Fifty-seventh Street toward the Second Avenue El. As he walked, he examined the mysterious envelope again. It was his first big break in some time. Hopefully, Anna Polotnik would know something that would lead Sam to his mother. But first, he had to find Anna.
An open-air touring car draped in advertising bunting for Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir advanced slowly. A man stood holding on to the windshield, calling out to people on the street over a bullhorn: “Protect yourself from exotic disease with Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir—every bottle made with the goodness of real radium for radiant health! Do not allow your loved ones to fall to the Chinese Sleeping Sickness! Purchase Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir today!”
Sam shook his head. Nothing made a man richer than exploiting another man’s fears. For a second, Sam considered finding a mark and using his powers to lift the fella’s wallet, but he decided against it. Right now, his luck was good. And if there was anything his superstitious mother had taught him, it was not to press your luck.
Feeling hopeful, Sam climbed the stairs to wait for the train.
He’d never noticed the brown sedan that had trailed him for several blocks.
The hush of the Bowery Mission was interrupted only slightly by the occasional whimper from bed number eighteen as Chauncey Miller dreamed of a war that never stopped. Bullets screamed overhead as two medics struggled to carry Chauncey’s stretcher across a muddy, smoke-shrouded battlefield. A soldier with a choirboy face lay slumped against barbed wire, staring up at the unforgiving sky, his hands resting prayerlike on the guts spilling from the jagged hole in his stomach.
“Stay with me, old bo—” The medic’s words died on his lips as a bullet found its home in his head, and he dropped like a storm-felled sapling. Around Chauncey, the tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of machine guns echoed through war-mangled trees while dying men keened for help, for forgiveness, for death.