Breath and Bones (31 page)

“I shall wear it over my heart,” she vowed, and then slid it into her pocket to coil with her own long red tail.

For a time, she was happy. Her hopes were strong; the madams paid her
decently; the whores did not bore her by describing their trade. And from each canvas, no matter how she altered it, Famke took the comfort of seeing some new beauty in herself, or at least in the ephemeral Famke that Albert remembered: the roundness of her former breasts, the fluid lines of her arms, the once-brilliant hues of her cheeks and eyes and hair. Those insights, as much as anything else, kept her moving forward, even as in each town she whispered a hope that this time, here, she would find her lover still at work, and in each town she was disappointed.

There were delays and complications: a fierce rainstorm that washed track away one afternoon, a fire set in a sculpture-rich parlorhouse the next. A little boy in Box Elder stole her hat, and evidence of the Dynamite Gang was everywhere. Fortunately she had learned to keep the bulk of her money in her secret pocket, where it rubbed against the goose girl's penciled features and blurred her face into complete unrecognizability.

Holding that now-faceless girl, Famke ran her eyes over the graphite shadows and tried to conjure them back to their original crispness. She did not dare try to touch them, not even with the brush she was learning to wield with more confidence. Just before putting the sketch away, she would turn it over and look at the words, which were blurring, too. Some of the letters had already disappeared—

Eventually, the only word Famke could truly make out was “love”—and by then it was almost too painful to look.

The electric air excites the nervous systems of newcomers to a high tension, producing a sort of intoxication of good health, with keen appetite, perfect digestion and sound sleep
.

M
OSES
K
ING
,
K
ING'S
H
ANDBOOK OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES

The elder tree in the girls' courtyard was losing hold of its autumnal gold. Every few minutes it shed a pinch of ore as a leaf fluttered down to the dark earth below, skittering through the square panes of the old-fashioned window.

Birgit's hands were shaking so badly that she knew she'd tear the thin paper, which was much weakened and begrimed by its long journey. She took the time to hunt out her letter opener—plain, functional steel with a slightly broken tip—and slice open the clumsy gout of sealing-wax. For a moment the blade reflected the yellow tree outside, and then the letter fell limply open in her hands.

Dear Mother
,

I think you must wonder what I am doing and where Famke is and the answer to both is I don't know but I have a few suspicions. I have been in Amerika five weeks now you know and it is a good country as imagined
.

But not cosy for finding somebody being so big. I don't think you should worry she is dead because everybody says she is very
dygtig,
the word they use is “scheming” which should make you glad. I met the family in Utah and they are unhappy she is gone but are helping me to find her with some pictures of her face drawn by the teacher. The husband is away. They seem to be good people and not like the Mormons we hear about in Denmark. They say she was happy here so that should comfort you but not so happy she didn't want
to run away, and maybe she'll come back if she can't find her artist and marry him again. Though I don't know for certain that is why she left. Maybe she realized he was not for her and is trying to return to Denmark, I believe I will find out if I ask at the rail stations. She will need this money which I have been saving because it is hers. My money is in my left boot and Famke's in my right so you needn't worry I will lose any of it
.

I am sending you a
handbill
because I think you might like to see it, none of us ever had our picture taken and it is a good likeness in my opinion even if her hair looks peculiar, it is not in the fashion of women here either but maybe the fashion has changed
.

Writing letters is still hard for me in spite of all the pains Sister Saint Bernard took over it
.

Respectful wishes
,

Viggo of the Immaculate Heart

Birgit stood at the window, gazing with blind eyes into the courtyard. So Famke had moved on; she was no longer with the missionary, perhaps no longer even a Mormon. That must be to the good—or was it? Even after decades in the black habit, Birgit could not muster the hopefulness and trust that came naturally to the young mortician's apprentice. She would have preferred for him to find Famke immediately; she would most have liked to open her arms and find the girl walking into them, borne forward by a swift steamship and a repentant conscience.

But it was not to be, not yet. She must go to the chapel and pray.

Birgit put the letter carefully away in her desk and would have locked it if a key existed. Then, upon reflection, she took the paper out again and tore it into shreds. There must be nothing for prying eyes to find. But that did not much matter; she had already committed every word to memory.

Viggo was raised by Catholic regulation, according to which each time of day had its particular duty and prayer, and to that groundwork the master-mortician had added scientific method. Thus Viggo was nothing if not systematic: He could not approach any task but in an orderly fashion.
So, as he marched away from Prophet City, he planned a course for finding Famke.

He started by interviewing Doctor Finstuen, the last person to see her before she vanished. “I've already told her husband all I know,” said Finstuen, looking askance at the shabby man who could scarcely string together an English sentence, who reeked of camphor and something suspiciously like alcohol besides. “He tried the hospitals and found nothing; I believe the woman has disappeared.”

Viggo thanked the doctor and asked him to post the handbill that Myrtice had designed. It was the first posting, and he thought the yellow page showed very well against Finstuen's dark paneling.

With Famke's picture in place, Viggo headed out to the streets of Salt Lake. To be thorough, he first checked the Deseret hospital and a few genteel restaurants—the same places Heber had made his inquiries—but he knew that widening the field would yield the best results. He had the advantage of knowing names Heber had never heard of, or at least that Heber thought insignificant.

A man who paid not one but three visits to Prophet City, and gave particular attention to Famke upon each of those trips, must be significant. Viggo decided to try tracing Harry Noble, and he made the round of hotels on his second day in the capital city. At the Continental, he learned that Noble had indeed been a guest, and—most interestingly—while staying there he had sent an urgent telegram eastward. There was still a record of it in the desk.

“You a Pinkerton?” asked the spotty clerk.

Viggo did not know what that was. “I believe not,” he said politely, wondering if he should enlighten the poor man about the complectual benefits of a light course of arsenic.

The clerk evidently decided that Viggo was harmless, for he turned the telegram book around and let him read. The message had gone to a Miss Mudge at the
New York Times
:

Seeking information Albert Castle, painter. Recently arrived U.S. Anything would help
.

Viggo concluded that Harry Noble was not Albert's pseudonym; he was a stranger pursuing at least one of the people in whom Viggo had an interest.
So, upon leaving Salt Lake, Viggo went where the clerk told him Noble had gone. Denver first: a dauntingly large city, and dirty beneath its smoke-stained dust of new snow. The people there were not particularly helpful, and an invisible hand cleaned out his pocket the first day—he congratulated himself on consigning his money and Famke's to his boots, where the calluses it formed reassured him as to the stability of their wealth. However, the packet of letters to Famke was gone, and Viggo would have a hard time forgiving himself for that.

In a process he was to repeat often over the weeks, he went to every hotel in town to ask about Famke, then Harry, and beg permission to post a handbill. He found Harry's Denver residence within the first day, but the journalist had already departed and there was no news of Famke anywhere Viggo looked, whether hotel or hospital, restaurant or genteel teahouse. And yet he knew she must have been here; and within two days a Bohemian's offhand remark led him to Amy Oggle's place and its spectacular
Nine Muses Inspiring Pleasant Thoughts
.

Viggo detected Famke's eyes and hair in the background of that painting right away, and he leapt to the logical conclusion. With the definite air of a rescuer, which won him no friends among the girls, he pointed to the shadowy Muse and asked to see her.

“Never worked here,” Amy said, blowing a speck of stray tobacco from her tongue. “Just a figure of the artist's imagination.”

“But very pretty and very nice,” the beautiful girl called Jo said eagerly, and Amy sent her off with the first customer who entered.

Viggo was not equal to deciphering the nuances of American speech yet, so he merely asked where Mr. Castle had gone. He thought they might look for Famke together. Amy gave him the same instructions Famke had received the first time: “Go into the mountains. Fair Play, Leadville, Boulder.”

As the door shut behind Viggo, she crumpled the handbill he'd given her and said to Big Kitty, who was eating a box of bonbons left by an admirer, “I declare, the next man who comes in here asking about that girl, I'm sending him to Timbuktu.”

“Is that what Mrs. Silks is calling her place these days?” asked Big Kitty.

And this [Santa Fé] is the historic city! Older than our government, older than the Spanish Conquest, it looks older than the hills surrounding it, and worn-out besides.[ . . . ] Yet, dirty and unkept, swarming with hungry dogs, it has the charm of foreign flavor, and retains some portion of the grace which long lingers about, if indeed it ever forsakes, the spot where Spain has held rule for centuries
.

S
USAN
E. W
ALLACE
,
T
HE
L
AND OF THE
P
UEBLOS

It was not just the graphite goose girl who was fading: Eventually Famke had to face the fact that she had developed an array of troublesome symptoms. Perhaps because of the coughing, her throat was always sore, and she had difficulty speaking; every bone in her body ached from the rigors of travel, and yet she was unable to sleep. Rising from her bed each morning required all the energy she had stored between the overnight fevers and chills. Some days it was all she could do to sit on a plush sofa and gaze, empty eyed, at clusters of canvas warriors and nymphs and hunt for the castle made of the letters A and C.

“You look peaked, Mr. Dante,” at least one
Luder
was sure to say at each house she visited. And still she continued her search.

As she grew sicker, the girl whom the whores thought was a boy brought out the maternal in them. They liked to rub Dante's shoulders and tell him what they could remember of his brother, without revealing that Albert had never mentioned another Castle. Dante was so slight, so delicate-looking, that the girls saw him more as a pet than a potential customer. They imagined they might take him to their beds and stroke his hair and talk all night, and in the morning be almost ashamed to take his money. But he never went with any of them. Maybe he was too young or too sick to have any interest in that area. Maybe he preferred something else; he was European, after all.

Dante was such a beautiful, ethereal boy that a fourteen-year-old in Manitou fantasized about painting his face with her rouge; he would look as pretty as she, like a great doll grown up. An older woman in Wild Horse thought she might suckle him and thereby restore vitality to a breast that drooped after maulings by miners and ranch hands. So, even without making the trip down the bagnio hall, Famke found her head pillowed against a series of soft bosoms. She was dosed with soothing laudanum and the alcoholic draughts shunned by Saints: Piso's Cure and Dr. King's New Discovery; Bull's Cough Syrup, Schenck's Pulmonic Syrup, and (furtively) Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, “developed by one woman for the complaints of all women.” She wasted a day bathing in hot springs that promised relief “not only for respiratory complaints but also for rheumatism, skin diseases, derangement of the kidneys and bladder, and especially all venereal diseases.”