Yeats let out a sharp laugh, almost like a seal’s bark. “Do you have much experience with wild ones?”
“I didn’t spend my entire life in the seminary,” Michael said. “And I saw enough to know that she fancies Francis. She kept touching his arm while she was talking to him.”
Yeats took in this information and continued his pacing, as if working through a mathematical equation. “Knowing what I do of your brother, and what his inclinations might be in the presence of a wild young woman, it is likely that he is otherwise engaged tonight.”
“You didn’t see any of this in your giant magic book of the future, did you?”
Yeats stared at Michael for a moment, and then looked away.
“So it’s to be the sofa for me, is it?” Michael said. “Well, I’ve slept on worse.”
Yeats ceased pacing. “We could strike out on our own.”
“Just the two of us?”
“If your theory is correct and I am only a delusion, then it would be you alone.”
“It’s more of a hypothesis,” Michael said.
“I suppose I understand your hesitation,” Yeats said. “Perhaps you prefer to be carted about like a child, or treated like an invalid. You are the youngest of the brothers, are you not?”
Michael paused for only a moment before hauling himself to his feet. “So you’re going to shame me into action, is that it?”
“That depends,” Yeats said. “Have you any money?”
Michael had a few crisply folded bills of uncertain denomination that Francis had given him before their Saturday walk. The money gave him a certain confidence, but there were other logistical difficulties to be overcome when a deaf-mute traveled with a ghost. He thought of the stilted exchange of gestures that vexed him and Martin. “Assuming we can find a taxi,” he said to Yeats, “how am I supposed to mime ‘big hotel’?”
“Check your pocket,” Yeats said, nodding toward the suit coat draped over the arm of the sofa. From the breast pocket Michael withdrew a business card; the gold-embossed crest at the center matched the one on the doors and awnings of the hotel.
“Where did that come from?”
Yeats shrugged. “Perhaps I put it there when you weren’t looking.”
“You tricky poltergeist!” Michael clapped his hands together. He hadn’t felt so full of life, so ready for adventure, since… since any moment he could remember. “Well, then,” he said. “Let us arise and go now.”
“Are you quoting me to me?”
“One of us was bound to say it. I thought it better for the both of us if I was the one to do it.”
HARLEM
THE SAVOY BALLROOM WAS the mecca of New York big-band jazz, the mile zero of swing, the hottest spot in Harlem—“the Home of Happy Feet!”—and it drew dancers from every shade on the color line: black, brown, beige, and white; jitterbugs and Lindy Hoppers; hep cats and duchesses. And the Savoy was all class; men were gentlemen or else they were gone. Charlie Buchanan, who had a tin ear for music but managed every detail of the Savoy down to the three-times-a-week floor polishing, insisted on that. More than once the bouncers—all of them ex-boxers, all of them in tuxedos—had shown an ill-mannered lady-killer to the door, to the sidewalk, and right into the Lenox Avenue gutter. The ladies of Harlem knew they were safe, if safe was what they wanted, and that meant they flocked to the Savoy, which meant that men flocked there double. The Savoy boasted two bandstands, the floor held four thousand, and the music didn’t stop until two in the morning—and that was the only math that mattered on a night out in the city.
As Francis and Peggy pushed through the front door and up the staircase that led to the second-story ballroom, Benny Carter was in the house and the joint was hopping. The Savoy was long and narrow—the Track, they called it—and by ten o’clock the floor was packed with couples swinging under the watchful eyes of the bouncers and the dime-a-dance hostesses. Carter was a sax man—one of the finest altos in New York City, and that meant in the world. When he stepped out to solo, the jitterbugs spun faster, black and white pairs weaving within inches of each other. At midnight, the weekly opportunity contest began and the dancers cleared the floor, or as much of it as they could; there must have been a solid few thousand on the Track that night. Pair by pair, the dancers in the competition took the floor and showed what a Lindy Hop could be if only it were given space to breathe and room to fly. Thirty minutes was an eternity for the onlookers to wait their own turn to cut it up again, but who could tear themselves from the spectacle of Carter’s orchestra pushing the show ponies and being pushed by them? After each couple finished, the crowd went mad with applause (or didn’t) and finally the night’s champions were crowned. The winning couple barely had time to embrace and claim their prize before the bandstand jumped back to life, practically midnote, and signaled the crowd to retake the floor and keep stomping until they felt the room shake.