The Kingdom of Bones (2 page)

TWO

A
fter church the next day, and in their summer Sunday best, Sebastian and his family boarded a trolley to the park at Willow Grove. He wore his dark suit and a straw boater. The women wore long, light dresses and Robert a white sailor suit. In deference to Elisabeth’s worries, Sebastian had hidden the revolver in the waistband of his pants. He’d tucked it right around in the small of his back so that she wouldn’t be aware of it, even if the movement of the trolley should throw them together. He hadn’t anticipated its effect in church, where sitting in the hard pew had made the service into an even greater torture than usual.

But he expected no trouble today. Today he was just a man with his family, one face in a very big crowd. The park at Willow Grove had been opened by the Rapid Transit Company to give people a reason to ride on their line, and its model of free concerts and fairground entertainment was being imitated in cities all over the nation. Brooklyn had its Steeplechase Park, Salt Lake City its church-run Saltair. But Willow Grove, Philadelphia’s Fairyland, was ahead of them all. Sousa, the March King, had brought his band to play there two years before, and now his visits were becoming an annual fixture.

Elisabeth loved the sound of a marching band. She always said that she’d inherited the love from her maternal grandfather, an old soldier who would forget everything when he heard one in the street. He would follow the musicians until they stopped playing, whereupon he’d discover himself lost in some unfamiliar part of town and unable to find his way home.

At the terminal station, they moved with the crowd through a tunnel under the tracks to emerge into the park. Frances took the boy off toward the midway while Elisabeth took Sebastian’s arm, and together they crossed to the pavilion of music. Elisabeth’s sister was good with the child, there was no doubting that. She lived with them for that very reason, and earned her keep as his tutor. He did not attend any school.

Sebastian found his son difficult to fathom. He had not begun to speak until he was five, and now cared for little other than his dime novels. Sebastian had forbidden them at first, thinking them inappropriate. But Robert’s interests were not engaged by anything else. He was a shy boy, indifferent to friendships or learning unless it was a subject that drew him. In the end, Elisabeth had allowed him one new dime novel every two weeks. He’d go down to the newsstand with Frances and could take anything up to an hour over his choice. He saved them, reread them, could recite entire passages by heart. Frank Reade, Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill. He could give you tables of contents with page numbers, list all the back-page ads for any issue. And yet a schoolteacher, whose name they’d agreed would never again be spoken in their house, had once tried to persuade them that their son might be an imbecile.

The band was playing “The Belle of Chicago” as Sebastian and Elisabeth took their seats. Sebastian cared little for music of any kind, but he cared for Elisabeth and as she watched the band, his eyes were on her. At thirty-one, she was his junior by a number of years.

After a while, she became aware of his attention.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re bored, aren’t you?”

“How could I be?”

She smiled and looked toward the stage, where the forty members of the Sousa orchestra were turning pages and making ready to strike up again. She tilted her chin up a little to catch a cooling breeze that came and went in a moment, and Sebastian’s heart seemed to swell in his chest.

She said, “Daddy once told me he’d buy me an orchestra to play in.”

“The euphonium?”

“The price was that I’d have to learn the cello instead. But that was before he lost his fortune.”

That was typical of Elisabeth’s father. When her family had money they’d lived in one of the big houses north of Market Street. Not quite the “best” district, North of Market was where the new money settled. Elisabeth had spent most of her childhood in a mansion on North Sixteenth Street, just below Columbia. Their neighbors had included families like the Stetsons and the Gimbels.

Despite his own humble background, her father had been a terrific snob, and even financial ruin hadn’t managed to knock any of that out of him. He’d disapproved of Sebastian—too old for Elisabeth, an immigrant, a lapsed Catholic with a Jew name, a paid-by-the-hour Pinkerton Man—and disapproved of him still. Only Frances passed between the two households, and brought them whatever news there was.

Until her teenage years, Elisabeth had been a princess of the nouveau riche. She’d owned several horses and had a servant of her own. She’d had Sebastian walk her by their old mansion once. He’d gazed at it in awe, while she gripped his arm and looked the other way. It had been quite something.

Now he said, “What do you miss most?”

“I’m the richest woman in town,” she said. “There’s nothing to miss.”

The band played “Liberty Bell.” Men tapped their feet, and women waved their programs in time. When it ended, Sousa turned and bowed to the applause. He was a slight, balding and bearded figure in pince-nez. As this was a Sunday concert, he wore a white uniform and gloves.

Joining in the applause, Elisabeth leaned over to Sebastian and said, “I wish you could tell me more.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Sebastian said.

“It’s not for my sake,” she said, “it’s for Frances and for Robert. How can I warn them if I know nothing at all?”

Sebastian looked away, took a breath, and sighed it out. What could he do? It went against his instincts, but she was probably right.

He said, “It concerns two brothers of an Irish boy that I helped to track down. Word has come through that the boy is to be executed.”

“And these two brothers are looking for you?”

“It’s always wise to keep one’s guard.”

“
Are
they looking for you?”

He did not mean to hesitate. It was only for a moment, but it was enough to give him away.

“No,” he said, regretting his attempt at guile even as it came out.

Her hand came up into view. He didn’t see where she produced it from, but she held yesterday’s telegraph message in it. Which meant that she’d known the truth all along. Over on the platform, Sousa raised his baton. She raised an eyebrow and waited.

“I’m supposed to be the detective here,” he said ruefully.

“Don’t shelter us quite so much, Sebastian,” she said. “Father kept the worst from us, and I hate that more than anything.” And then, as the music began, she started to rise, saying, “I think I’ve had my fill of marching for now. Let’s head on over and rescue Frances.”

The midway stood beyond the Electric Fountain and the lakes, with two large carousels at either end of the broad walk. Beyond the midway were the perilous-looking Shoot-the-Chute ride and other big park attractions. New rides were being planned and added every year. The crowds were dense, but should they fail to find each other Elisabeth had determined that they’d meet at the Lakeside Café. Robert generally made for the larger of the two carousels, where he was fascinated by the mechanical arrangement that gave the animals a jumping motion.

But neither he nor Frances could be seen there, and so Sebastian and Elisabeth started a slow walk back down the midway toward their rendezvous point. There was no reason to hurry. They had more than half an hour to waste until the meeting time.

Most of the attractions on the midway were housed in permanent structures, in a row that resembled one side of a small-town street facing out across a green. Some of the vacant spaces had been leased to visiting showmen, and here Sebastian could sense a change in atmosphere and tone. Their put-up buildings were brasher and shabbier than the regular ones, and the show people fronting them were similarly turned out. This was Willow Grove, and so they were on their best behavior. But they were like yard dogs given a bath and a big ribbon.

Nevertheless, they were a powerful draw. Their ballyhoo seemed to attract even the most decent citizens where, by logic, one would expect it to deter. Brazen, crude, and primal, their showmanship appealed to the primitive in all. Exhibitions of natural curiosities stood side by side with novelty acts. Largest of all, and brashest among the sideshows, stood a boxing booth.

It was a big tent of dirty canvas, before which a painted proscenium had been raised on a scaffold with a platform that set the pitchman above the heads of the crowd. He had no megaphone, but intoned his message with a nasal cadence that was unlike natural speech but which fell on the ear like a ship’s fog warning.

“Three rounds!” he was saying. “
Go
three rounds
with
the Masked Champion
and
win five dollars
and
compel him to reveal his face to all.”

The so-called Masked Champion stood behind him in a dirty robe, his face concealed by a device no more elaborate than three holes poked in a knitted cap. He was tall and heavyset and badly out of condition. He was scanning the mostly male crowd, making a show of seeking out challengers.

“
Nev
er unmasked and
nev
er defeated,” the barker went on. “Will you be the man to do it? Have we got any men out there? All I see is a bunch of ladies.”

Some of the people booed and the barker continued to scan the gathering, working them with an expression of superiority and contempt.

“You!” called out the Masked Champion, pointing at someone in the crowd and shouting in a whiskeyed voice that barely carried over their heads. “I’ll fight
you
!” And when his first random target held up his hands and shook his head, he chose another and pointed and shouted again. “I’ll fight
you
!”

Elisabeth nudged Sebastian playfully.

“Go on, Sebastian,” she said. “He says he’ll fight you.”

And for a moment it did, indeed, seem that the moth-eaten Masked Champion had picked Sebastian out of the mob to issue him a personal challenge. Sebastian avoided any meeting of eyes and told Elisabeth, “I somehow don’t think so,” but already the Champion had moved on and was pointing to provoke another.

“I have never seen a boxing match,” said Elisabeth.

Sebastian turned to her in surprise. “Would you want to?”

She did not reply. But there was a sparkle in her eyes as she returned his look, as if daring him to respond to some hint that she’d just thrown out and he’d failed to notice. It was a look that he’d seen from her before. It usually marked the start of a path that would lead, in the end, to a private act. But he’d never seen it quite like this, and never before in a public place.

Before Sebastian could say anything more, there was a roar of approval from those all around them.

“We have a challenger!” the barker announced. “What’s your name, boy?”

Sebastian immediately assumed a stooge, but the young man pushing his way to the front of the crowd was surrounded by friends of a similar age and seemed to be a legitimate member of the local public. “Henry Keenan,” the young man shouted back, handing his hat to somebody and beginning to struggle out of his jacket as he moved.

“Come on up, then, Henry Keenan,” the barker called. At the first sign of a contender, the Masked Champion had lowered his head and disappeared back through the flaps of the tent. “Take your seats inside, folks. No spitting, no gambling, no climbing into the ring. No children, sonny.”

Elisabeth was still looking at Sebastian, still daring him. All around them people were starting to push their way toward the entrance to the booth, buffeting them like a passing flood.

Sebastian had seen something of life. He was fairly certain that the experience would not be as she imagined it. But how to explain that to her, without seeming to treat her like a child?

So he inclined his head slightly as if to say, Why not? And they gave in and went with the flow.

On the inside, the boxing booth was like a grimy circus tent over a cattle auction ring. There were shaky-looking wooden bleachers on all sides around the fight area. The place had almost filled up as Sebastian and Elisabeth found seats in the middle of a row. Sebastian had worried that his wife might be the only woman to join the audience, but she was far from alone.

The young challenger, now in shirtsleeves, had been given a well-used pair of gloves and was being laced into them by his companions. In the opposite corner of the ring, the Masked Champion was alone and taking off his robe. He had no second; all available hands were out among the crowd, moving along the rows and taking money.

As the robe came off it revealed high boots, long johns, and a woolen undershirt, with baggy trunks over. This closer look confirmed Sebastian’s first impression. The man’s body was powerful looking, but neglected and past its prime. There was something touchingly domestic about the way that he clumsily straightened the creases out of the robe before hanging it outside the ring, as if he had no other and it needed care. Sebastian wondered if he had just the one knitted mask, as well. It covered his entire head, showing only his eyes and his mouth.

In the middle of the arena the showman paced and swung around, favoring every corner of the tent with a commentary. He was there to keep the sense of a show alive for as long as the necessary business took.

“The man in the mask has fought before presidents and the crowned heads of Europe,” he declaimed. “He has traveled the world and he has never been beaten. He has a special contempt for the males of Pennsylvania, who he says are the weakest-looking bunch of old women that he’s ever come upon.”

The males of Pennsylvania responded exactly as they were meant to, loudly and angrily, and the atmosphere became even more charged. It was a strange sight, the Philadelphia middle classes hooting and hollering like farmhands at a cockfight. Sebastian looked at his wife. She was slightly flushed, and he could sense the tension in her; she was glancing all around and missing nothing.

He reckoned he had a fair idea of how it would go. The professional went through this every day of his life, several times a day. A young blood in gloves was unlikely to trouble him much, however full of vim. He’d keep it going, giving the crowd their money’s worth, making it look as if there was a real chance of an outcome, and then probably put the boy down midway through the third. The boy would be carried off with honor, bearing some manly damage and a tale to be told, and the Masked Champion would go back out front to the platform and do it all over again.