Julia’s throat swelled. She clamped down against tears. Married. Oh, Eva. That was why she’d wanted to change the wording of her dedication page. The irony was unbearable.
“She wanted the ship’s captain to perform another ceremony,” Jerome said, “for pictures to send out with the announcement. We were going to stay in Paris as long as the money lasted. It was to be our honeymoon, but what she really loved was the idea of afterward, being a teacher’s wife, having a few babies, singing in a choir, writing some. She has talent, you know, not that you’d see it in that damn novel. She has a nice vernacular style, an easy, clean voice.”
“I’d have thought she had plenty of money,” Julia began, until she remembered that Timson controlled Eva’s bank account. Good God. When would men and banks trust women to manage their own funds?
“That’s what Timson wanted everyone to think. He bragged about her big salary like he was so generous, but he took most of it back for rent and ‘security’ fees. He actually charged her for the goons he hired to make sure she toed the line. She got just enough cash to keep herself looking good, which was all he wanted to pay for anyway.”
Julia’s sense of Eva’s elegant life slipped even further. “What about her jewelry? Couldn’t she sell some of it to buy those tickets?”
“He watched what she wore. She was like his expensive pet—she had to look rich to show how rich he was.”
“No wonder she wanted out.”
“And she was proud of that book money, thought it was respectable. She wanted to show my parents she could measure up to their Strivin’ standards.”
They sat nearly knee to knee now. In the linty heat Julia’s slippery legs eased apart. Another few degrees, and she’d be no better than a slumbering grandma. “Where is she, Jerome?”
He took the hat from her lap. In his dark hands, his fingernails rimmed with dried blood from cracks and fissures, the thing looked as ridiculous as Marie Antoinette’s towering powdered wigs. He made a fist and hung the limp pouch of straw, felt, and Belgian ribbon from it, like a foppish head on a bloody pike.
She hiccuped a weak laugh.
Jerome made a kind of laughter too. Julia tasted salt. She sponged at her face with her scrap of lace and linen. Jerome wiped his with the crown of her hat.
He laid the sticky wad in her lap. “You need a new hat.”
She caught his thumb. “Where is she?”
“I do not know. Honest to God.”
Julia let go of his thumb.
“You could ask your boyfriend.”
“My boyfriend?”
He swiped his face again, with the back of his hand. “I saw the way you looked at him. Wallace knows. He’s the one who stuck me in here. Some child brings me cigarettes and vile stuff they call food, and I just piss away the days in this oven. Might as well be in prison.”
Julia barely heard him over the shouts in her brain. Wallace knew where Eva was?
Wallace knew. He’d lied to her. Each time he’d said he didn’t know, he’d been lying. Each time he’d listened to her worry and speculate, his silence had been another kind of lying.
She straightened. “Can you communicate with her?”
“I write notes, but who knows what the boy does with them. I know one got out—” He stopped. “Lanier. It was that sap who told you I was here.”
“I made him tell me. Don’t blame him.”
“What a gent. He’d twist his knickers to please a pretty girl who talks Yeats.”
“What about Eva? Have you heard from her?”
“Two notes, both queer, both begging for that damn manuscript. How the hell do I know where it is?”
Julia considered this puzzling news. “May I see?”
He stood. As he moved, the cot’s thin mattress shifted, and something clattered to the floor. Julia nearly gasped when she saw it: the barrel of a gun, poking out of a small chamois bag. She shrank back, thinking wildly of what to do. Was it better to try to dive for the thing before he could grab it, or run like mad?
Jerome made a startled noise too. “Damn thing. It’s not mine.” Julia spread her palms in a ridiculous semblance of a shield as he picked up the bag with two fingers and folded it shut.
“Wallace’s men gave it to me, in case someone comes nosing around. As if I’d last two seconds in some shoot-out. I’d feel safer without it.”
He pushed it back under the mattress and pulled a small leather satchel from under the cot. He lifted out its contents: a few framed photographs she didn’t have time to see and two folded letters, both typed. One fell open long enough for her to read its letterhead: The Criterion. The letter from Eliot. Of course he’d save that. Before the pain of its new irrelevance could unsettle her, she watched him remove a pile of old newspapers, limp and wrinkled in the heat. They were covered with blue ink, written in columns across the length of the pages, perpendicular to the print: palimpsests. The script was swollen and distorted, possibly no longer legible on the unsized paper. From beneath them he handed her a square white card.
The card stock was heavy and expensive with a mouldmade deckle. In a large spiking hand, each stroke like a wayward arrow, was written: Baby, it’s important! Please give my book to Mr. Wallace’s boy. XO! E.
“The other one’s just like it.”
Julia read the note again and turned it over. The back of the card was covered with a dozen or more lines written in a tight, crabbed cursive of blue ink, spattered with blotted-out words and webbed with lines threading substitutions to be inserted. A poem in progress.
Jerome returned it to the bottom of his satchel. “I might as well use the paper.”
“You’re writing?”
“What
