The Hidden Man (14 page)

OPENING NIGHT FEBRUARY 20TH, 1915

THE PANAMA-PACIFIC INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION

T
HE GRAND OPENING OF
the Panama-Pacific International Exposition went splendidly well for the city of San Francisco, whether the American president helped to fake the impossible chore of turning on the lights from Washington, D.C., or not. Either way, it was safe to assume that not one person who wandered the six hundred and twenty-five acres of newly made land and manufactured wonders had ever seen anything like it.

The Remington Rand company had a giant typewriter, twenty-five feet high, that actually typed the day’s headlines. The Tower of Jewels glittered with hundreds of thousands of individually hung glass gems that vibrated in their mountings with the wind. Hidden controls operated automatic fountains in beautiful patterns of water sculpture. And everywhere, brand-new electric lights, an unknown phenomenon to many visitors, illuminated everything better than daylight, just as soon as the sun went down.

The visitors were confronted with and overwhelmed by the world’s first modern theme park. The entire fairground glowed like some sort of enchanted fairyland filled with themed architecture. While the beguiled families strolled along in a state of awe, it tended to be only the breadwinners who noticed that the entire exhibition was a complex machine that efficiently caused all of a person’s cash to disappear.

Over in the northwestern corner of the grounds, the elaborately designed Palace of Fine Arts and its reflecting lagoon were set up for James “J.D.” Duncan’s series of brief, intimate shows. These performances consisted entirely of personal hypnotic treatments, “plumbing work” as he called it, on the essential energy flow of the individual audience members.

Since he did not remember to hire anyone to watch his backstage area as he had told Blackburn that he intended to do, he now paced amid the temporary curtained “backstage” without any protection at all. Only the fact that he had forgotten the matter altogether kept him from being alarmed over it.

Shane and Blackburn kept watch on the crowds, coming and going. Occasionally, their eyes met and they shook their heads, acknowledging that neither one knew what they were supposed to be looking for.

Vignette quickly discovered that the work of the Ladies’ Hospitality League in their pavilion at the top of the Zone was the hardest “easy” work she had ever attempted. After Miss Freshell arrived with Vignette in tow, there was a flurry of chirpy introductions among the members, pleasant ladies who ranged in age from a couple who were younger than she was, right up through old great-grandmothers who were there with two or three generations of family women, all working together.

The names and faces came at her so fast that she went into a smile-and-nod mode, to get herself past the moment without offending anyone. After that, the job seemed to mostly consist of wandering around the pavilion and passing out cider or snacks to anyone who wandered in. Each lady was to engage them in pleasant conversation, as if it were somehow any of their business how these people got there, why they came, and how many relatives they brought along to the exposition with them.

To Vignette, these women all appeared to have taken on some sort of military commitment to bombard every hapless wanderer who stumbled into the place with more food and affection than they had ever experienced.

According to Miss Freshell, the lesson had been learned at the Chicago World’s Fair, years before—people, it seemed, were even more inclined than they might naturally be to send plenty of glowing reports home about a visit to a place, when the people at that place gave them tons of free cider and muffins, reliable directions, and an overabundance of cheerful attitude. So said one of the ladies, anyway.

And so for nearly four hours, she was in character as an enthusiastic volunteer, entirely because Randall asked it of her. The look in his eyes and the tone of his voice when he made the request were like nothing she had ever seen in him before. It nearly stopped her on the spot and forced her to blurt out a question about it. She managed to keep quiet, but the effect remained. She was going to do this thing. She was going to find some way to make it work, even though some dark part of her heart throbbed with the fear that, with her crammed into this place, things could not turn out well.

In the meantime, the Ladies’ Hospitality League position was the same as a regular job, in most ways. The grim fact was that it was the same as a regular job in all the ways that mattered. Every attempt at a job that she had ever put herself through, back when she still attempted such things, turned out badly in the end, and the end never took long in coming.

She knew that the part Randall found most troubling was that she was never fired for incompetence or carelessness. She was fired because people simply did not like having her around. She got the message. She even understood their point of view on that, since she was usually the one who felt repelled first. The problem was that she had never been able to put the reasons for the thing into words for him or for anyone else.

It was never the job, it was the role. Always the damned role. To her experience, any one of the few jobs that a woman was allowed to do was either something that was stupidly simple and repetitious, or was a position of direct servitude under some male boss. Meaning that she could either choose to be slowly strangled by the dreadful boredom of a repetitious job in some factory, or she could be the unofficial concubine/secretary of some executive, which would require a daily mantle of subservience to all things male.

There was also retail sales work, of course, which required the ability to suffer fools gladly in the constant flow of presumptuous, demanding, cigar-smoke-blowing men who found it baffling that you do not live to serve their whims.

She tried twice, in her late teens, and only got into a fistfight with the merchant marine that first time. The second time she had the wisdom to turn around and walk out of the store and never go back when the manager passed behind her so closely that he deliberately rubbed his stiffened member across her buttocks.

If she had been holding a sharp object, Vignette knew without a doubt that she would have shoved it into his groin. She knew that a prison cell would kill her, so she was grateful to have been empty-handed in that moment.

It had always struck her as odd that factory work and clerical work both caused the same reaction in her. In both environments, she quickly developed a suffocated feeling, one so strong that she could not ignore it. When things reached that state she was a goner, as far as the job was concerned. All somebody had to do was shout at her, or grab at her, or, worst of all, sneer at her in some condescending way, and that was it. She had given up punching people for a long time now, and usually managed to get out without spewing much verbal anger. Sometimes, though, some sorry bastard thought that he was going to put one over on her for no other reason than that she was there alone. Then she had to let it out.

She restrained her urges to fly into him and tear at his throat by allowing herself the wonderful luxury of hurling such a forceful, venomous tirade into his face that he was certain to have
never
heard any other woman talk to him in such a way, except perhaps his unmannered whore of a mother.

Oh, the looks on their faces. Sometimes the cigar smokers actually had the thing dangling freely off of the lower lip, stuck there by a little spit and tobacco juice, just because their mouths were open so wide. Few of them ever gathered their wits enough to match her verbal onslaught.

Vignette’s favorite moment of every job was when she was quitting because some man pushed her so far that her anger was perfectly justified. She realized that she was taking a physical risk by allowing herself to explode on some snarling male animal, but the act itself reminded her that she was still alive. She was still Vignette, a living soul, not just a collection of forced behavior and the brunt of endless disrespect from others. And if a man felt the need to use her for some kind of verbal punching bag, then the opportunity to throw sheer wildness into his face was one she would not ignore.

So far, it appeared to her that she had succeeded in getting herself hated for it just about everywhere she went. On those jobs, even other female workers avoided her or openly opposed her. They did not care for the way she shook things up. She may have been looking at them as if they were sleepwalkers shuffling through a giant maze, but they were comfortable in their ruts and did not want her interference.

That evening, while Vignette walked around the pavilion, she could not help but notice that these ladies also seemed to be very comfortable in the smile-and-serve role. If they were not actually having a swell time pretending that their visitors’ jokes were funny, she could not tell.

She wondered if it were possible that they really enjoyed this so much. And if not, how did they hide their feelings so well? It baffled her. Her face had always seemed to be a signboard for whatever she was feeling at the time. Poker would never be her sport.

Tonight, in this situation where she could not allow herself to fail, she felt the old constrictions like belts tightening across her chest. There was nothing to do but ignore it, so she put extra effort into rushing up and greeting many of the visitors before the other ladies had the chance to get close to them. She hoped that it came across as perky and enthusiastic, since it helped to move the hours along. But she could not tell if she was fooling the ladies or not.

“Vignette?” It was the Eastern Whore.

“Closing time already?” Vignette asked, as if surprised that it could be so late.

“It certainly is! You have been wonderful tonight! I am proud of you, and I plan to tell Randall that, too!”

“Why are you so happy? I’m suspicious.”

“I am not happy, I’m cheerful. It helps people to receive difficult news if you are cheerful when you present it to them.”

“So why are you being cheerful with me?”

Miss Freshell playfully hesitated.

“Oh, all right. What’s the news, then?”

“Vignette! I’m just playing with you! But the fact is, we’ll be using a team of two ladies every evening, to stay behind and finish up here after closing time. Each team will be taking turns at the shifts for a week at a time.”

“We don’t get to go home yet?”

“All we have to do is put the supplies away and get the place ready for the cleaning crews to come through later. Probably half an hour, maybe less.”

“Aren’t you hungry? I’m starved.”

“Well then,” said Miss Freshell with a perfectly serviceable smile, “let’s shoo everybody out, lock the doors, and get started!”

She sashayed away, swinging her low-hemmed woolen skirt. Something was out of kilter about the woman’s behavior; Vignette had never seen her willingly extend herself to anybody, and her relationship with Randall seemed to consist mostly of getting him to do things for her. What sort of delight could she be finding in this little performance here?

Vignette had a bad feeling in her stomach. It told her that her very discomfort was the source of the Eastern Whore’s delight. Then she hurried after her, realizing that it must be later than she thought. Even though the cleaning crew was not due for another half an hour, one of their janitors was already pushing a broom, over near the back wall.

The nondescript man had walked directly to the pavilion’s storage closet. It was unlocked, as he predicted, so he reached in and took out a push broom. He had used push brooms many times in the past, doing reconnaissance work. He found it to be a perfect way to move around a room anywhere you want to go, while blending into the background. Most people tried not to notice janitors anyway. He smiled. It was as if people were afraid that if they made eye contact, you might ask them for help with the chores.

When he combined his naturally nondescript qualities with the invisibility of a janitor’s work, he moved around as unnoticed as a very light breeze. He kept his eyes on the broom head; peripheral vision told him plenty.

While the rest of the ladies filed on out of the building, two appeared to be staying behind. The younger one, boyish looking, had nothing to recommend her to him. But the elder of the pair was something to see. Oh, she was too good. She even fit the pattern, that same image that always sank its hook deep inside him and pulled him along as helpless prey: sophisticated looking, with honey-colored hair that made her seem more pure to him than a darker woman. Sweeter to destroy.

If he was to survive to complete the mission, he had to find another stopgap female victim. And this one, this one could be her ten times over. She appeared so polished, she was nearly waxed and buffed.

With that, the idea struck him fully formed. If he could get her back to the dead space, he could probably expel enough rage to get him through several more days.

He decided to spend a couple of evenings doing his reconnaissance work in this end of the Zone, get the story on these hospitality ladies or whatever they were supposed to be, and start looking for opportunities to separate her from the tomboy long enough to spirit her away.