He pushed my hand away. “Good God, not here,” he huffed, looking over my shoulder. I looked behind me as well. Abe Ruef, the lawyer and mastermind behind Schmitz’s political graft operation, was approaching at a clip. A small, bespectacled, grim man, Ruef, having eyes only for Schmitz, missed the pack of photographers who were following behind him, angling for their shot. It was the photograph the papers wanted—Abe Ruef and the mayor, the infamous grafters.
“Vera, this way,” Schmitz said, leading me by the elbow. “Now just keep talking. Is that a new dress? Lovely, lovely. This way.” Schmitz kept on with a string of babble as he steered me toward a side door, through that door, down a short hall, then through another door, which led to a service area where they stored props and broken chairs and discarded sets and trash, a sort of alley that ran alongside the auditorium proper.
I was glad to be out of the crush but tired of being led, especially where I did not wish to go. I shook off the mayor, whose grip was bruising my arm.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Just a bit farther.” He looked back to see if anyone had followed us. As we neared the far door, this one marked “Stage,” he halted.
“Whoa, you startled me back there,” Schmitz admitted. “You know there are scores of reporters watching my every twitch. What’s so urgent?”
“This.” I handed him the note.
He stepped back, as if stung. “What does it say? Am I supposed to read it—now?”
“It’s from Rose,” I said, lowering my voice in case anyone was listening.
“Rose?” he whispered. “Rose who?”
I looked at him evenly. “The madam? Rose of The Rose?”
“Rose of the—? How do you know—?”
I lowered my eyes and waited for the picture to take shape in his mind. He wasn’t stupid, my mayor, not by a long shot, and if I was to learn anything from him, it was to observe the way his conniving mind flowed nimbly from one possibility to the next: a violinist becomes a conductor becomes a mayor becomes a wealthy grafter, then a hunted man, the up-downs like the notes on a musical score.
“So, you’re… ahh.” His face bloomed with recognition. “Hers?”
I nodded. It was odd—I’d waited my whole life for the truth to be known, but the way Schmitz was looking at me, with unsavory interest, I had the urge to shield my face.
“Julia and I, we always wondered—I mean, we thought early on, you didn’t quite stack with Pie.” Schmitz made an unfunny twist with his mouth as he worked it out. “We assumed… guessed, you must take after your father, who passed… what was his name?”
“Lars,” I said.
“Ah, right, Lars.” Schmitz nodded, agreeing with himself. “Jesus Christmas, Rose has a… daughter.” He shook his head. “Rose’s daughter,” he repeated, as if the words wouldn’t make sense until he’d said them a hundred times. Schmitz nodded at the envelope. “So, what news does your Rose have for me?”
“I don’t know.” I pressed the envelope into his hand. “Maybe it’s your miracle.”
“I doubt it,” he grumbled, but being just the sort of person who would believe in a divine reprieve, he added brightly, “I thought you didn’t believe in miracles.”
“I said I didn’t believe in prayers.”
“Ah, right. Right you are.”
He winced as he read. “Well, that’s that,” he said, crushing the note in his fist and tossing it into a bin of trash. “At least I can count on you to look after Eugenie.”
“Of course,” I said.
With no topic safe to mention, we fell silent. That was its own kind of intimacy; I didn’t like it. In the vast reaches behind the stage door, a woman was singing. She was doing scales.
The mayor pointed his nose in the air like a hound. “Hear that? That’s Carmen.” He cocked his head to listen. “Flat on the E. Poor Olive, she’s nervous.”
I didn’t care about the E. I was thinking that the mayor should have stayed a violinist. Then he wouldn’t be such an obvious crook, and Eugenie wouldn’t have to see her father hauled off to jail. I felt bad for Eugenie but I didn’t feel too awful for Schmitz. I expected he deserved what he got. I was regretting that I’d revealed to him, of all people, my secret about Rose.
“Let me ask you, Vera, something I’ve given thought to, considering my, uh, circumstances. You’re someone who thinks for yourself, right? Who hasn’t had, well, clearly not, a conventional life.” He searched my face, as if I were a door he needed to pass through to get to a better hideout. “Strictly in the abstract, do you believe the ends justify the means?”
I thought for a moment. “I guess that would depend on what ends and what means.”
“Eh… family?” He showed me his empty palm and lifted it skyward.
Watching that empty hand, I had a sudden inkling of the play before me, that is, the mayor’s secret orchestra. The whole lot of them, lawyers and bookies and saloonkeepers, were on the take or contributing to the take—this underground society of wheedlers and bargainers—all fed into and drank from the same filthy, civic trough filled with cash and favors and gold. In the crowd, Abe Ruef had looked to me like a rodent with glasses, scurrying for his next bit of cheese, and my own Rose too, oddly, decidedly nervous when I went to her place and offered myself—she was sharp and tired and dug deep. The game, I was beginning to comprehend, had to do with trying out words to hide deeds—words and more words till one fit, like a shoe or a hat, till the ends justified the means.
And what was worse, far worse? As I stood by Schmitz and considered him with a good deal of righteous scorn, it occurred to me that the same trough that fed him and Rose fed me too. If I wasn’t careful, I’d grow up to be as
