“Smashing day, isn’t it?” he said. “The king himself couldn’t have ordered better weather.” Martin had aimed his accent toward British lord but he probably sounded more like a cockney bootblack. It was no matter. The man, somewhat perplexed, returned the greeting and Martin breezed into the fair.
He immediately found himself in a crush of people streaming between the House of Jewels and the Hall of Fashion, blocky white structures that looked as if they had been stamped out of industrial molds. Down one lane towered a two-story mural of a faceless giant celebrating ASBESTOS: THE MIRACLE MINERAL. The aesthetic seemed to be two parts Mount Olympus to one part comic-book hero: the statues and murals all sported hulking chests or ice cream–scoop breasts. And with the skies clear and the brutal temperatures of yesterday having faded to a milder form of heat wave, everyone seemed jubilant. Children waved miniature British flags, and a smiling woman walked past wearing a hat topped with a miniature Trylon and Perisphere. Martin took it as a good sign that the fair didn’t feel like a place that had just witnessed a regicide.
Indeed, the World’s Fair, in that summer of 1939, was a place full of promise. It promised a world of frozen food and hot jazz, a world that would be better supplied and better organized in power, communications, transport, and amusement. Ribbons of highways would connect skyscraper cities where every citizen had a home in the clouds and a car on the road. Food grew in abundance under glass-domed orchards, or came flash-frozen, or Wonder-baked, or in strips of bacon fanned like playing cards and ready for frying. Not to be outdone by the likes of General Motors, the nations of the world offered their own visions of organization, abundance, and peaceful coexistence. At the Italian Pavilion, a waterfall cascaded from the feet of the goddess Roma to a bust of the famed inventor Marconi, while inside visitors read of the return of a new Roman empire. At the Soviet Pavilion, larger than all the rest, a golden worker hoisted a red star into the godless heavens, while the British Pavilion embraced the whole of its empire, from its northern corner of Ireland to Australia and New Zealand, then on to India and Southern Rhodesia—all connected along a grand Colonial Hall.
Martin considered the possibility that Francis had lost his nerve—the best outcome, really—or had already tried and failed and was right now dead or in custody. Without a better plan, he had to follow Cronin’s diktat: find the king and you’ll find your brother. Working his way down the glutted Avenue of Patriots, he passed pavilions dedicated to science, religion, and the WPA. In the plaza that surrounded the Trylon and Perisphere, he asked a woman in an extravagantly floral hat if the king had passed by already. “Yeah, mister!” she said. “He went thataway!” and pointed up the long central axis of the fairgrounds, with its gargantuan George Washington, assorted demigods, reflecting pools, and fountains. From far off wafted the unmistakably aggressive brass of a high-school marching band, all trumpets, trombones, and tubas, and he edged his way in that direction. He still carried the morning paper’s special section marking in minute detail the route of the royal visit through the fair’s themed zones—up Constitution Avenue, right on Rainbow Avenue, left at the Pennsylvania Building—and naming every national pavilion that the royal entourage would pass, from Belgium and Japan to Czechoslovakia and Romania. But nowhere did it mention whether Francis was alive or dead, captured or lurking between the Court of Peace and the Town of Tomorrow.
ONCE HE’D EXITED Perylon Hall, Francis found himself in some sort of circular garden. He was sweating, feeling the panic rise in him, but as he picked his way through the garden, he began to think that perhaps chasing the monarch would actually be easier, in the end, than the tension of standing in line. It would be a game of hide-and-seek played in a dreamworld of gleaming white towers and titanic statues. He had seen the king with his own eyes as he strode past the unlucky members of group 17. He was just a man, like Gavigan had said, as if that was supposed to make it easier. Nothing about this day was easy, and it would have to get so much harder before it was over.
According to the schedule, the royals would soon begin a slow-motion tour of the fairgrounds. Cronin had told Francis that if the original plan broke down, he should look for the hinges, transitional moments where opportunity lurked: the royal party getting into or out of a car; the protocol-driven hesitation that followed the opening of a door. Franz Ferdinand had been shot when his car took a wrong turn and tried to right itself in a narrow lane. Cronin had told him that the archduke’s assassin had pissed himself before he took the fatal shots. Try to hold your water, will you? he had said. If it was an effort to lighten the mood, then it was Cronin’s one and only attempt at humor.
On a tourist map of the fairgrounds, Cronin had traced the king’s route with a thick line of ink. Xs marked the hinges where Cronin saw the best chance to act, and now Francis could cross-reference the map with the timetable: 1:00 to 1:50, lunch at the Federal Building; 2:19, Canadian Pavilion; 2:40, Australian Pavilion. It was easy enough on paper to find the king, but in the flesh-and-blood world, Francis faced a crowd unlike anything he had seen before, not to mention the legions of police in their blue tunics and Coldstream Guards in their shaggy black bonnets. Pressing his way toward the fair’s main boulevard, he found himself surrounded by a girls’ pipe and drum corps that had just emerged from the Perisphere, which Anisette said contained the city of the future. So the future would have bagpipes; what a shame for the future. Now merely one among the kilted masses, Francis again checked the map. The best thing to do was get in front of the king, and be ready when the moment came. He put his finger on the last X Cronin had drawn: the British Pavilion.
He checked his wristwatch. Off in the Bron-ix, Peggy was now a married woman. In another hour, Martin would start warming up his band. And if Miss Bloch had played her part, Michael would be there too, no longer Sir Malcolm but simply Michael Dempsey again.