“Carter?” the old man croaked, the grooves in his face deepening with suspicion.
“It’s a terrible emergency.” The bill danced.
Julia hadn’t seen what denomination she’d pulled from her bag. Perhaps it was sizable. The old man studied it and opened the door just wide enough for them to slip inside. Nodding at his toothless “Make it quick, miss,” she pressed the money into his hand.
They threaded their way through the narrow aisles, chairs atop the bare tables. Swept-up piles of litter lay about the floor, waiting for the man to follow with the dustpan. Stale smoke deepened the gloom.
Julia retraced her steps of the other evening, pausing only to get her bearings before plunging into the backstage maze. Fortunately, the space was deserted and silent, and high clerestory windows offered some dim light. She picked a course in the general direction of the back hallway that led to Jerome.
She hesitated outside the door to his cell. The door was again propped open with the rusty iron. Nothing stirred. A drab light from the window in the alcove revealed the drifting lint and desiccated brick walls she remembered. Crumpled and smoothed newspapers lay stacked on the scarred table. Julia took a deep breath. “Jerome?”
Nothing. Then a scrabbling and the creak of bedsprings. More shuffling and the sound of shallow panting. A shadow fell across the table. Jerome moved warily into view, gripping his trousers at the waist. “Miss Kydd?” His voice was thick and hoarse.
“We’ve come to talk with you. It’s important.” She edged forward, brushing Austen’s hand to warn him of the heat and stench.
Jerome watched them approach, eyes not yet focused. His cracked lips gaped open. He didn’t move, except for the rippling of sinews in his bare feet as he fought a slight sway.
“Something strange has happened, and I think you can help us make sense of it.” Julia stopped about five feet from him. “We think Eva is sending out sections of her manuscript, to Pablo and now to Austen.”
Jerome dragged his tongue over his lips. He fumbled to roll his trousers waistband for lack of a belt, and he pulled back his shoulders in search of his once-perfect posture. “What do you mean? How?” His mouth worked stiffly, lips, tongue, and teeth in clumsy collision. When had he last spoken to anyone?
Julia felt Austen slip away behind her. “We don’t know how. Or even why. But please look at this.” She took a thin envelope from under her arm and laid its four pages on the table.
Jerome held the top page close to his face with both hands. He read the first several lines in the dim light and dropped his arms with a thud. He nodded.
“You recognize it?” Julia tapped the manuscript.
“Of course. It’s from Eva’s novel.”
“Funny thing is,” Austen said, “I’ve read it before. In a manuscript sent to Boni & Liveright sometime in the past couple of years. A novel called Till Human Voices Wake Us.”
Jerome’s fingers curled and uncurled a corner of the top page. “Funny, all right.”
They waited.
When he looked up, it was with relief. “That’s all it was meant to be. Our little joke. Putting one over on all you editors who decided I couldn’t write anything you’d ever publish.”
“You wrote Harlem Angel, and Eva claimed to be the author.” Julia spoke it as a fact but held her breath, waiting for Jerome to admit or deny her conjecture.
He nodded.
“It’s mostly her story,” Julia went on, “plus some parts from your first book, the one you couldn’t sell.”
He accepted this with a sigh. “After the writing, being an author is mostly just selling anyway.” He lowered his eyes and stroked his dense new beard. When he glanced up, a glimmer of his old pride returned. “We knew Eva would be a dream author—pretty, glamorous, star purveyor of Harlem strut and shine. Pablo loved it from the start, and we kept adding the things he liked. The things that make him, you know, squeal.”
Julia nodded. She knew the exact sound. “Wasn’t it risky?”
She remembered Eva’s hesitations during their first conversation, asking if Julia had written Wilde’s Salome. Those tentative comments must have been among her first spoken as an impostor writer. Perhaps this was why Eva had talked so much about passing after Billie Fischer had accused her of being a fraud, to divert attention from this other deception. And no wonder Eva had looked at Jerome with such alarm, even terror, when Timson had refused to return the manuscript.
“We were going to drop the charade once Duveen delivered the contract and payment,” Jerome said. “But Eva discovered she fancied the ruse. She loved being taken seriously as a writer, and she thought all the attention would mean more money in the end. She wanted to wait until after we were safely in Paris before coming clean about the hoax. I thought that was asking for trouble. We argued about it. The more attention she got, the more I worried something would go wrong.”
He stopped fidgeting. “I’m glad someone knows. Has Duveen figured it out?”
“I doubt it,” Julia said.
“Hold on. This doesn’t make sense.” Jerome leaned against the filthy bricks. “How could Eva send these? She doesn’t have the manuscript. She wrote to me begging for it.”
He was right. Julia’s mind had narrowed too quickly to the mystery of authorship, forgetting the problem of the missing manuscript. She answered slowly, formulating a new theory. “Maybe we’re wrong to assume Eva is sending the pages. But if not her, then who?”
“Whoever stole it from Timson’s safe.”
Fear jumped in Jerome’s eyes. “His killer?”
Julia could only nod. She was back to her one certainty: the killer had to be someone desperate to get that manuscript. Who? Her thoughts spun yet again to consider Duveen and Goldsmith, arriving as always at the strong though not absolute likelihood of their innocence. Wallace? For the hundredth time she reviewed his account of that night and morning. She had only
