Magruder's Curiosity Cabinet (5 page)

The Tiny Favor

“That's all?”

Kitty and Archie stand in the public area of the Manhattan Beach Hotel. The wide corridor is dotted with shops—a ladies' hair salon, a barber shop, a florist. Kitty's stomach is aflutter at being in this hotel again. “I should tell you I was tossed out of this hotel a few days ago.”

Archie laughs. “I'm impressed! But don't worry, you'll be fine. It's not the hotel that concerns us; it's that establishment there.” He points at one shop in particular: Pearson's Fine Art and Collectibles.

Kitty looks at Archie again. “That's all you want?”

He smiles. “That's all I want. Go in, do as I told you, say what I told you, and then? We'll enjoy a fine meal.”

Kitty's stomach roars at the thought. She is about to open Pearson's door when a young man passes by. Kitty recognizes him immediately. He's dressed in street clothes, not the bellhop uniform in which she'd met him earlier, but his freckles and wayward red hair are unmistakable. “Excuse me,” she says. “Seamus? Seamus?”

The young man turns, and his face somersaults from recognition to disbelief to something much like horror. “Err…I'm sorry, miss,” he stammers, backing away. “You must have mistaken me for someone else?”

Kitty grabs his arm. “You're Seamus… You had a name tag. I remember. You brought our bags up to our room. You must remember! It was just a few days ago. Surely you—”

“I'm sorry, miss,” he says, backing away. “I don't know you? We've never met?” His Belfast accent turns even the simplest statements into questions.

“But—”

“No! No, I don't know you.” He looks at her sadly. “I'm sorry? I can't help you?” He flees.

Kitty calls after him. “But, Seamus, please! I've nowhere else to turn! Seamus!”

“That's enough,” Archie says sharply. “Don't make a scene. Go do as you're told.” He nudges her roughly toward the door of the art gallery.

Kitty watches Seamus disappear into the crowd. She sighs. “All right, I'm going.” She takes a deep breath and reaches for the door. But as she opens it, she catches a glimpse of her reflection in the glass.
Good Lord.

She's sunburned, for starters. And not a lovely, holiday-in-Sardinia sort of sunburned. Her skin is splotchy and red, and the skin on her nose is starting to peel. Her eyes are bloodshot, her lips are chapped, and her long, blond locks are “braided” only in the most charitable sense. She'd hide the whole catastrophe with her hat, but she seems to have lost it somewhere. She's trying to remember where she left it—did she have it at the ferry?—when Archie hisses “Go on!” and shoves her across the threshold.

The walls of the narrow art gallery are crowded with dreamy visions of seaside holidays: delicate young ladies in bathing costumes, hearty young men piloting sailboats, suntanned children building sand castles.

A polished gentleman in a fine suit approaches, sizing her up. Kitty freezes, and her stomach flips over. He knows. She can see it written on his face: she looks less like an art collector and more like a Bedlam escapee, and
he knows
. Next, he'll toss her out, and Archie will abandon her, and she'll either starve to death or be eaten alive by the tattooed wolves that hunt Surf Avenue. Or he'll call the police, and next will be jail and then deportation, shipped back to London in a steerage container full of rats…

But then she thinks,
Dinner rolls.
Might as well give Archie's plan a go. In seventeen years, she's never had so little to lose.

“I'm terribly sorry to trouble you,” she says pitifully. “I've no wish at all to—”

The man tilts his head curiously. “You're English?”

“Yes. My name is Katherine Hayward.” Archie had advised that she use her real name; he said it would add authenticity to her voice. But her voice still catches a bit as she stands on the precipice of reciting Archie's first lie. “Of the…Cornwall…Haywards? My father is in railroads. I assume you've heard of him?”

The man's eyes widen, his suspicion morphing into obsequiousness. “Of course, of course, the great Hayward family. Jewel in the crown of Britain's transit system. Who hasn't heard of them? I am Edward Pearson, at your service.”

Relief washes over her, and Kitty struggles not to laugh.
Is it really going to be this easy?
“My parents have taken a house out in Sea Gate.”

Pearson smiles. “How delightful! I do hope you enjoy our modest accommodations. Would you care for some tea?”

“I couldn't…”

“I insist.” He smiles even wider.

Kitty is gobsmacked. “Tea? Well…all right. Why not?”

Pearson guides Kitty to a seating area in the back of the gallery. He arranges her in an overstuffed chair, calls to an assistant for some tea with lemon, and settles down beside her. “So tell me, Miss Hayward, how might Pearson's Fine Art and Antiques be of assistance?”

“You see, Mr. Pearson—oh, thank you!” A young shop assistant has appeared with a cup of tea and a few cookies. “You see, this home we've let for the summer is lovely. A bit smaller than I'm used to, of course.”

Mr. Pearson brays his understanding. “Of course. American architecture cannot possibly hope to offer the sophistication of what you are accustomed to back home. Still, the weather is lovely by the seaside, and one must make do, mustn't one?”

“Exactly, Mr. Pearson. And truly, it is a charming home, absolutely charming. Unfortunately, the decor of the place…”

“Mmm-hmm?”

“Well, it's not quite up to our standards. No offense intended, of course.” She nibbles on a cookie, forbidding herself to swallow it in one bite.

“My dear, none taken! Indeed, that is precisely why Pearson's Fine Art exists! We understand that our visitors have much more sophisticated tastes than the average American.”

“My mother is of a rather sensitive disposition, you see, and some of the artwork in this home we've rented is…a bit…”

“Of course!” he says. “Here at Pearson's, we specialize in providing soothing, relaxing images for refined customers. Here, let me show you. I have a portfolio of all our best work right in the—”

“But you see, Mr. Pearson,” Kitty says, “I'm afraid my parents have rather unique tastes.”

“How so?”

“They'll only be truly comfortable with art that resembles their own collection back home.”

“
Of course
, I understand completely. Whatever their tastes, Pearson's can—”

“Dutch Masters.”

Pearson nearly spits out his Darjeeling. “What?”

“Rembrandt, Vermeer…” Kitty struggles to remember the other names Archie had told her to say. “Umm, Hall, is it?”

“Frans Hals,” Pearson says miserably.

“Right, Frans Hals. Busty washerwomen, men in large hats…everything lit via that same window on the left. That sort of thing.” The first sugar to hit Kitty's system in days makes her giddy. “By the way, why are the windows on the left?”

“I'm sure I don't know, Miss Hayward.”

“So,” she says, starting in on her second cookie. “Got anything like that?”

Pearson glances at his gallery walls—a cacophony of tasteful seascapes with nary a washerwoman in sight. But then he remembers a large painting covered in newspaper, tucked at the back of the shop. “In fact, I may have just the thing…”

• • •

Ten minutes later, Kitty has finished her tea and several additional cookies. She shakes Pearson's hand and assures him that her father will visit the shop at closing time in order to purchase a Dutch Master for a healthy sum.

Kitty meets Archie as planned in the lobby of the hotel.

“Well?” he asks eagerly. “How did it go?”

“Fine, I think? He can't wait to sell some horrible painting to my nonexistent father.”

Archie smiles. “Excellent. Wait here while I pay Mr. Pearson a visit.”

“I don't understand,” she says. “How does this earn me lunch?”

He leans over and whispers, “As luck would have it, a few days ago, I brought Pearson a painting of men in large hats, lit from the left. He assured me it was utterly out of fashion, that there was no market for it. I told him to keep it for a while and think it over, and if he still felt he couldn't sell it, I would be more than happy to take the painting away and never trouble him again.” Archie straightens his tie. “Something tells me Mr. Pearson may have altered his thinking on the subject.” He takes three steps toward the gallery but turns back. “Once I am paid and you are fed and everything is in its right place, you and I are going to have a chat about that young fellow Seamus.”

Missgeburten

The Race to Death is about to begin. Spectators line up outside Magruder's, and Zeph stands by the door in his cart, taking their dimes and directing them to the back room. He collects admission from respectable ladies in summer bonnets with their escorts in straw hats. He makes change for a trio of shopgirls and a gaggle of sunburned teenagers. He exchanges gossip with some Moon Maidens from Steeplechase Park; they've found themselves with a free afternoon after the Trip to the Moon ride was unexpectedly shuttered for the day. And he greets an elderly couple, unmistakably foreign in their heavy wool coats. The husband struggles to understand American money, while his wife sweats aggressively into her striped scarf.

Zeph smiles. “You might take your scarf off, ma'am. No cooler inside, that's for sure.”

“
Was ist los
?” the husband demands suspiciously.

“The…uh…” Zeph starts to point at the scarf but thinks better of it. “Never mind. Enjoy the show. Follow the others around to the back.”

Finally, lurking like a vulture waiting for the lions to finish their dinner, a scarred and scowling fellow with only one arm arrives. “What in hell are you doing here?” Zeph demands.

Joe holds out a dime. “Here to see the show, just like anybody.”

“I told you, Timur ain't helping with your—”

“I want to see the show. I swear, the Race to Death is all I'm interested in.”

“Yeah, that's what worries me.” But he sighs and takes Joe's dime. “All right, go on back. Don't blow nothing up while you're back there.”

Zeph is about to close Magruder's heavy door when he hears a familiar voice.

“Hey, wait for us!”

Zeph smiles to see a small old friend with a tall, young companion. “Hey, Chief! Come on in, brother!”

Whitey Lovett is the fire chief of Lilliputia, the little people's village at Dreamland. He stands four feet, two inches in lifts, which he wears in direct defiance of Dreamland's policy that little people remain as little as they can possibly be. With piercing blue eyes and a fashionable walrus mustache, Whitey has a richly earned reputation as the biggest ladies' man in Coney Island. This afternoon, he's accompanied by a willowy blond who Zeph vaguely recognizes as a fortune-teller from Luna Park. He can't remember her name, and he knows better than to ask Whitey, as there's little chance he remembers it either.

They all exchange pleasantries, but Whitey's expression quickly turns serious. “Was that who I think it was?”

“Who? You mean Joe? You recognized him from all the way over—”

Whitey nods. “He's Black Hand, you know.”

“Yeah, and?”

“Is he recruiting?”

Zeph laughs. “Me? Nah.”

“Good. Unusuals can't afford to be anarchists, Zeph. Look at me—I'm a dwarf and a Jew. You're a Negro and legless. Add ‘anarchist' and you've got the Trifecta of Fucked. Don't do it.”

“Don't worry.”

“All right. See you inside, my friend.”

• • •

The stage, such as it is, is an elevated platform made from an old bed frame. The frame is set at about waist height, and it sits atop complex machinery—gears and levers and pulleys—like the honeymoon bed of a mad watchmaker. Ringing the edges of the bed are handheld magnifying glasses, attached to the structure by long chains. What used to be the headboard is painted with a large—and not half bad, if Zeph does say so himself—mural of the Palace of Versailles in France, with its thousands of windows. At the foot, a second mural faces the first—the comparatively modest Royal Palace of Madrid. A red velvet curtain is laid out across the bed, obscuring everything else from view. P-Ray scuttles around and underneath the platform, finalizing his preparations.

Zeph motors into the room in his cart and parks by the headboard. “All right, little man? We ready?”

P-Ray's head pops up at the foot of the bed, and he nods.

“Everyone!” Zeph calls the audience to attention. “Please, gather round. Come in close, and grab yourself one of them magnifying glasses. You don't want to miss nothing. C'mere, Chief. You can watch from up here by me, if you like.”

Whitey pulls himself up onto Zeph's cart, his beautiful fortune-teller standing beside him. The rest of the crowd assembles in a circle around the platform, each holding a magnifying glass up to one eye. “You are about to witness a reenactment in miniature of the infamous road race from France to Spain. Twentieth-century gladiators facing off in the modern arena of the open road. More than two hundred took part in that doomed race last year. Who survived? Who perished? Ladies and gentlemen, Theophilus P. Magruder's Theatron Prodigium presents the Paris–Madrid Race of 1903. Or, as the papers called it, the
Race to Death
.” He winks at P-Ray. “Okay, kid. Do your stuff.”

P-Ray runs to the headboard and turns a crank, which eases the red curtain off the bed to reveal the landscape separating Versailles and Madrid—seven-hundred-plus miles of countryside rendered in miniature. Green felt for grass, blue for water, brown for sand and dirt. Rolling hills dotted with little wire trees and shrubs, with a line of tiny flags marking the border between the countries. A winding gray road connects the two palaces. It stretches up hills and down valleys, twists sharply right and left, through towns, over bridges, across borders. Scattered along the route are collections of tiny black specks. The crowd leans in, squinting through their magnifying glasses.

Fleas. Dozens of fleas.

Each flea is in costume. There's a French pastry chef flea, with a white apron and puffy hat. A pair of flamenco dancer fleas in dramatic black-and-red outfits. A soldier flea, a priest flea, a little old lady flea, a mother flea pushing a baby carriage. A flea dressed as Émile Loubet, the president of France, and one dressed as Alfonso XIII, king of Spain. Photographer fleas with tiny cameras at the ready, and firemen fleas on little red trucks. One sad old flea costumed as a town drunk.

They are arranged in clumps at various points along the gray road—witnesses to the coming horror. The human audience stares down at the insect one. The fleas waggle their little legs in the air.

“Wait a minute,” one of the teenagers says. “They're alive?”

Whitey's date casts him a worried glance. “They won't come after us, will they?”

“No,” Whitey assures her. “Of course not. They…” He pauses, feeling the sudden need to scratch. He turns to Zeph. “They won't…right?”

“Don't worry,” Zeph replies with a smile. “The costumes are attached to the board…keeps 'em pretty well tethered.”

One of the respectable gentlemen huffs and itches. “Pretty well, eh?”

“More or less,” Zeph says with a wink.

Joe the anarchist chortles into his single sleeve. “I love this place.”

P-Ray scuttles underneath the bed, and soon a small motor whirs to life. Then he runs back to the headboard and pulls another lever. A panel in the headboard slides open, and four cars smaller than matchboxes roll forward. Each has a tiny flea driver and a tiny flea engineer, all wearing tiny hats and goggles.

Zeph claps. “Here come the starting cars. There are several French drivers in our opening lineup today. On the far left, Marcel Renault in a car his brother designed, and beside him, a second French driver, Charles Jarrott. Next to Jarrott is Camille du Gast, one of the first ladies to earn a driver's license—”

“The beginning of the end,” Whitey intones, and his date smacks him playfully.

“—and that fourth car is driven by none other than William Vanderbilt, of the illustrious Vanderbilt family.”

Joe spits on the floor. “May they rot in hell.”

“P-Ray, a little racing music, if you please.”

P-Ray hustles to the corner. Beside Robonocchio's cabinet sits Timur's homemade orchestrion, a silver player piano rigged with a kettle drum, two flutes, cymbals, and a triangle. The boy pulls a lever, and the machine shudders. The kettle drum pounds, and the cymbals crash as the orchestrion floods the room with a sarcastically happy tune—surely the most chipper version of Chopin's Funeral March ever played. Timur programmed it himself; it's the only evidence Zeph has ever seen that the Doc might possess a sense of humor.
Dum, dum, da dum, dum da dum, da dum, da dum
(
ting!
goes the triangle).

Zeph reaches into a small drawer in his cart and removes a starter pistol. He holds it up. “Ready, set…and as they say in Versailles,
allons-y
!”

Bang!
Zeph fires the pistol, and the audience jumps. He gazes at them happily.
Startled and itchy
, he thinks.
Just how we like 'em at Magruder's.

The cars toddle down the road, little puffs of smoke rising from their engines. And no sooner have those four cars begun their journey than four more appear at the headboard and start down the track as well, followed by four more and four more.

Zeph continues his narration as the cars chug along the track. “Ah, Monsieur Renault has taken an early lead. You know, the Renault car is capable of reaching an astonishing ninety miles per hour.”

A Moon Maiden gasps. “Isn't that dangerous?”

“Well,” Zeph says with a smile, “we don't call it Race to Tea and Crumpets, now, do we?”

He gives P-Ray a tiny nod, and the boy pushes another lever. Suddenly, one of the cars in the middle of the pack skids out. It flips over twice, sparks shoot out of the engine courtesy of a small firecracker in the back, and the car bursts into flames. Oncoming cars swerve to avoid the crash. One miscalculates and hits a tree.

“No!” Zeph cries. “Our first incident! I'm so sorry, that's a German driver down.” He addresses the last to the old couple. The husband smiles politely, but the woman doesn't respond. She daubs at her wet face with her scarf, looking as though she'd rather be anywhere else.

Zeph gives P-Ray a subtle wink, and this time, a small panel in the road flips over, revealing a flea dressed as a small child, holding a tiny red balloon. “Look!” Zeph shouts. “An innocent child has wandered into the road! Whatever shall we do?”

P-Ray pulls a string, which drags the brave soldier flea into the road to rescue the child, just as a car veers around the bend. The child flea goes flying into the shrubbery, but the soldier can't escape in time. Car and soldier tumble down a tiny hillside in a puff of smoke.

“Oh dear,” Zeph says. “The ultimate sacrifice.”

Joe bangs his sole hand against the bed frame by way of applause. The German lady starts murmuring, and her body starts to quiver. Zeph watches carefully—occasionally, you get a bad reaction to killing a soldier, even a six-legged one.

“Tragic but historically accurate,” he says quickly. “Look now! Camille du Gast has stopped her car to provide first aid! Isn't that the most noble—”

The German lady cries out, her body stiffens, and she falls face-first onto the track. The audience backs away from the bed fearfully—
is this part of the show?
—except for Joe, who leans in, fascinated.

As her husband tries to peel her off the bed, the German lady moans and convulses. She smashes the platform with her face, her hands, her heaving body. Trees are crushed, cars sent flying. P-Ray screams and starts to cry. He tries to rescue his pets, but Zeph pulls him back, afraid the boy will end up on the wrong end of the woman's flailing sausage fists. She foams at the mouth, and white spittle sloshes over the little gray road.

Then, as quickly as it began, the seizure ends. The woman lies in the middle of the miniature landscape, panting and sobbing. The audience stands in shocked silence while the orchestrion sings away heedlessly.
Dum, dum, da dum, dum da dum, da dum, da dum. Ting!

“My word,” Whitey says. “I do believe the German has flattened Barcelona! International incident, for sure.”

“You're not funny,” his date mutters.

The spell broken, the rest of the audience retreats: from the back room, from the Cabinet, as far from this lousy part of town as possible. As they file out, P-Ray rushes around the bed, trying to collect his fleas. But like the humans, most of them have fled.

Whitey offers to fetch an ambulance for the sick woman. The husband says, “
Nein, nein
.” Zeph and Whitey object, but the old German is stubborn and angry—as though Magruder's were somehow to blame for his wife's episode.

“
Ich sagte nein
! We go to hotel!” He takes off his coat and puts it around his wife as he drags her off the bed and into a standing position. “
Wir brauchen keine Hilfe aus einer Gruppe von gottverdammten Missgeburten
!”

“What was that now?” Working for Timur has provided Zeph with a wide variety of experiences—being insulted in foreign tongues is one of his least favorite.

Whitey turns to his date. “You're vaguely Prussian, aren't you? Did you get any of that?”

“Ah…” She hesitates. “
Gottverdammten
is, ah,
goddamned
. And
Missgeburten
is…
freaks
.”

“Right!” Whitey says brusquely. “No ambulance for you!” He pulls his fortune-teller to the door. “Enjoy your doom,
mein herr
. Zeph, I'll stop by later.”

Zeph goes to P-Ray and rubs his back as the little boy sobs. “Shh, it's okay, little man. Machines get fixed. Fleas get found. Don't worry… It's okay.”

Joe looms over them. He's holding one of the smashed-up cars in his hand, and an eerie expression plays across his face. “Quite a show,” he says. “You should charge more.”