At last the gangplank lowered, and the passengers began to emerge—and there he was. Tall and handsome, hatless as always, his battered valise still streaked with desert dust. His features glowed as though lit from within: the proof of his true nature, visible only to those, like herself, with the power to see it. From one wrist glinted the iron cuff that trapped him; it also veiled his mind, making him the only person in the crowd—perhaps the world—whose thoughts she couldn’t sense.
He must’ve spied her from the deck, for he angled toward her unerringly. They stood together as the crowd rushed around them and the air filled with greetings in a dozen languages, a Babel of reunion. They smiled at each other.
“Well,” the Jinni said, “shall we go for a walk?”
They went to Central Park, he still carrying the valise.
They kept to the main paths and spoke little, though there was much they might have said. She considered asking about his visit to the desert and the jinn—his own people, of whom he spoke so rarely. What had it felt like, to be in their presence again? She imagined pain, joy, regret—how could it be otherwise? But perhaps he didn’t want to talk about it yet. She had no wish to cause him pain, to start an argument, when he’d only just returned. There’d be time for all of that later. For now, she merely wanted to be with him again.
He, too, had questions he might’ve asked. How had she fared these last weeks? He couldn’t help thinking of Michael, the husband he’d never met. She mourned him, surely, but he saw no outward sign of it. Perhaps he was meant to ask—but he knew next to nothing about the man, let alone the specifics of their brief marriage, and felt a half-guilty reluctance to learn. Far easier to leave it alone, for now, and simply be glad of her company.
The shadows lengthened; the crowds dwindled. She drew closer to him now as they walked the Mall—and belatedly he remembered that she’d been forced to stay indoors each night that he was gone, a hostage to the societal rule that no woman of good morals went out alone after dark. He smiled now, watching her gaze up at the elms, strangely proud to be the one whose presence meant she could walk the lamp-lit cobbles, and enjoy the cool and misted air. And she smiled, too, to feel the Park’s life-force all around her, the earthly strength so like her own.
They left the Park through the Columbus Circle gates, walked south along Broadway’s thoroughfare. Each passing sight—Madison Square with its tidy paths, the Washington Square Arch awash in electric light—was a landmark of their relationship, the spot of some discussion or confrontation. They’d discovered each other in these places, over those nights. Now, in silence, they listened to the echoes of their past arguments—but fondly, without rancor, their eidetic memories in perfect agreement.
They reached the Lower East Side, and her boardinghouse. She looked up at her own dark window, then at his glowing face.
“Until tomorrow?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed, and they parted.
Alone, he walked west. He crossed the Bowery—a brief burst of noise and light—and continued through the Cast Iron District with its facades of painted metal. At Washington Street he turned south again, passing shuttered markets, tobacconists’ shops. To his right was West Street and the river; he heard shouted orders, the thumps of barrels, laughter rising from a cellar shebeen. To his left, the blocks narrowed and grew angular, the streets pulling together as the island thinned, drawing him along to Little Syria, the neighborhood at its tip. Here the street was dark and quiet, save for a solitary light that glowed from a half-subterranean shop window. Arbeely & Ahmad, All Metals, read the sign above the steps. Through the window he could see a man at a wooden workbench, his head cradled upon his arms, his back rising and falling in sleep.
The Jinni opened the door carefully, reaching up to still the bell—but Arbeely woke anyway. The man sat up, rubbed his eyes briefly, and then smiled. “You’re back,” he said.
“I am,” said the Jinni, and set down his empty valise at last.
2.
East of Central Park, inside a Fifth Avenue mansion that reigned among that street’s many splendors, a young woman named Sophia Winston was readying for a journey of her own.
Were it an ordinary voyage, the servants would have been in an uproar of last-minute preparations. Instead, they crept past the half-open door to her bedroom as she bustled about filling her trunks herself, her back to the fireplace that she kept at such a blaze that one could feel it down the hall. The girl’s mother had informed the household in no uncertain terms that they were to provide no assistance, nor were they to speak of the matter. They weren’t even told where Sophia was going. Driven to desperate measures, the maids had picked through the girl’s wastebasket and uncovered a crumpled list. Split skirt for riding, short-heeled boots, three sets of long woolens. Canvas duck, waxed twine. Aspirin tablets in water-proof tins. Six dozen hairpins of good quality steel. It all seemed to point toward a Subcontinental expedition, not a young woman’s holiday, but their snooping yielded nothing more. And so they did their best to pretend that the girl was not, in fact, preparing for a secret voyage of some kind, when—if all had gone according to plan—she ought to have been embarking on her honeymoon.
In a private study elsewhere in the mansion, Sophia’s mother, Julia Hamilton Winston, sat at her small, elegant desk and surveyed the middle-aged couple across from her. They were man and wife, or so they said, with matching sturdy builds and coarse, sun-lined features. In all, a drab and unremarkable pair—which pricked at Julia’s sensibilities, but in this case, she had to admit, was entirely the point.
“Your
