“For now.” Yeats blinked hard and again looked right, then left. “This way.”
On the Grand Concourse, trucks bearing ice or bundled newspapers or bottles of milk trundled into the city. Two taxicabs rolled past, their drivers nodding at the wheel, before Yeats told Michael to raise his hand to signal for a ride. A third car jerked to a stop at the curb.
As they entered the cab, the driver turned his squashed face toward Michael and mouthed some variation of Where to, buddy? Yeats advised Michael that this would be the time to give the man the card in his pocket. Michael did as he was told and sat back with a look of satisfaction on his face. He was insulated from the grumble in the man’s throat, the chewed-over words about the middle-of-the-night Bronx fare who was too highfalutin to speak to a cabbie.
When they arrived at the hotel, Michael handed the driver one of the bills in his pocket and kept his hand out, awaiting the change that the driver grudgingly provided. Then he was out of the cab and up the stairs, and he was sure, for a moment, that as he exited the cab he saw the woman from last night—the pretty one, the wild one—ducking her head into the same car he had just vacated, and he was about to call this fact to Yeats’s attention, but when he turned his head one way Yeats was gone and when he turned quickly the other way, the weight of the day and the night and the spectrally assisted travel from the Bronx to Manhattan descended suddenly on his shoulders. He caught a last glance at the taillights of the cab—was Yeats now traveling with her?—just as a man in livery tipped his cap and pulled open the door, and then he was inside again, crossing the lobby, brightly lit against the predawn gloom.
The man behind the desk nodded to him and turned toward the vast bank of pigeonholes where the room keys were kept. With another nod, the man handed Michael his key, and with a sweep of his arm indicated the location of the elevator. In the elevator, Michael showed the key with its numbered tassel to the operator, and then the doors were opening and he was following the hallway to his room. The weight on his shoulders grew heavier and his head began to cloud and he was through the door and across the sitting room and into his bedroom, where he shucked his clothing article by article, and when he felt the mattress against his shins he let himself fall.
Now it was sometime in the evening, the sun low in the sky but still a long way from setting, and he was alone. Abandoned, even, but—what’s this?—not forgotten. In the center of the sitting room was a wheeled cart topped by two silver domes. Under one was a fat T-bone steak and under the other some sort of… well, what? It was a large white orb, perhaps some kind of gigantic onion, with concentric rings of scorched brown marking its lines of latitude. Michael prodded it with a spoon, which revealed the surface to be hard and stiff. A more deliberate jab with the spoon cracked the shell and unleashed gobs of vanilla ice cream. Oh, heaven! He spooned mouthfuls of ice cream flecked with sugary meringue into his mouth. Had he for one moment thought badly of Francis for leaving him alone? If he had, then all was forgiven. Michael settled onto the sofa, and alternating bites of beef with half-melted ice cream, he was certain that Francis was the greatest brother that a brother could hope for.
FIFTH AVENUE
MARTIN KEPT ASKING FRANCIS, What’s the plan? But there wasn’t any plan beyond the FC Plan, and that was working like gangbusters. The money and the clothes and the air of well-bred Scottishness had led to the Britannic and its first-class dining room, which had led to the Plaza and now to his next destination: the Binghams. Yesterday he had received a card, creamy paper embossed in gold with the family name and address. On the back, in a chain of tight curlicues, Mrs. B—Delphine, he was supposed to call her—cordially invited Sir Angus and his brother Malcolm to dinner on Monday evening. Even Francis, who had never been formally invited to anyone’s home for dinner, could sense a tremor of urgency behind the invitation. Who dined out on a Monday? Could they really be so worried about losing their monopoly on the attentions of their young Scottish aristocrat?
Michael, who had been crashed out in bed all day, would have to stay behind. Martin must have dropped him earlier, and all without waking Francis, who had slept until noon, and who could blame him? Blame the gallons of champagne and whiskey at Martin’s, the dancing and the gin at the Savoy, the frenzy of the Lindy Hoppers, the return to the Plaza with Peggy. God, that Peggy! She was another one of the spoils of the FC Plan. He hadn’t even given her the Scotsman act, but the sharp suit and the giant’s bottle and the fat roll of banknotes had certainly promoted his cause. Hadn’t she called him a gentleman? Would any of it—this life he had led since fleeing Ireland—have come to pass if he had been the flat-broke brother of Martin, camped out in some cold-water rooming house or sleeping on the tatty floor of Martin’s apartment? Not one bit of it.