frighten you somehow?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you carry a rabbit’s foot when you know you’ll encounter him, and you’re stroking your thumb over it inside your left trouser pocket.”
It was true. I had the French tonic raised contemplatively before my nose, and my other hand trying to squeeze some luck, any luck, out of a chunk of taxidermied bunny. Draining the bubbles, I stuck my arm out for more.
“That bad, was it?” Mr. Salvatici sighed. “It’s a damnable thing, how efficient that boy is, and how depraved at the same time.”
“If he’s depraved, you made him that way.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You killed his father.”
This pronouncement tore a hole in me so wide that my fear poured right out to pool around our ankles.
There. You’ve said it.
Mr. Salvatici had never hurt me, and he wouldn’t start now.
With legs like jelly, I went to the dovecote and unlatched it, selecting a misty grey bird with the sweetest white bars over her wings. I cradled her as I carried her back. Sat down and watched her fluff herself awake. It was as if I’d set off a bomb and there we sat with a thin high shriek in our ears, watching shrapnel fall like confetti.
“I’ve been reading your journals,” I continued, eyes on the pigeon. “I’m dreadfully sorry, but I needed to know, and. You’re not my father, are you? My stepfather. You’re my stepfather. In a way.”
Mr. Salvatici winced minutely, just a crinkle at the edges of his pale eyes. Topping up our drinks, he went to the railing, taking in the glow and stink and glory of Harlem below us, all the lives he played with while his birds wheeled untouched over the melee.
“You needn’t be frightened, Nobody,” he said softly. “As the man who taught you how to dig for secrets, I can’t be surprised over your unearthing mine, not when I was so careless over them. I suppose . . . I almost wanted you to. That’s cowardly, but I saw no reason to upset you if you were contented. This way, you had the choice whether to learn about me or no.”
Car horns blared in the distance, and the gentle bird nuzzled my hand. I’d sat here with Mr. Salvatici more times than I could recall, and now in the very center of our ever-so-peaceful oasis all I could see was how he looked the night I staggered into his hotel for the first time—fresh from his bath, half dressed, with kindly old Mr. Benenati’s blood staining the water cherry pink in the next room.
“I met Catrin on the ship from Europe.” The Spider turned to face me, resting his lean body against the wrought iron. “I don’t suppose, knowing her, that she ever told you anything about me? The past is a foreign country, so far as Catrin is concerned. I was in second class, and your mother was in steerage, but I caught a glimpse of her on the promenade just after a vicious squall that had everyone prostrate in their bunks—supposing they’d bought bunks—and the air was sparkling that morning, electric. She’d snuck onto the deck and was staring out over the waves, and there was . . . a calm about her, and a beauty, unlike anything I’d ever seen.”
Nodding, I brushed my index finger over the pigeon’s quavering head. Mum was nothing if not beautiful. And calm.
“The ship’s captain married us. I was poor, and she was poorer. But I was also enchanted, and afraid, and alone, and she was . . . amenable?”
“Things happen to people.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Mum says things happen to people.” I focused on the pleasantly rough avian feet gripping my hand. “You happened to her, so she said yes. Like later, you happened to me.”
Smiling, Mr. Salvatici shook his head. “Catrin to the letter. And therein lay the problem, you see. I very quickly realized that I’d foolishly tied myself to a woman content to drift wherever life took her. Did you know that she won her berth to America in a card game, in a bawdy house where she plied her trade in Cardiff? Oh, yes. She held that ticket, mulled it over, and decided, why not? I thought she would steady me, ravenous striver that I was, but soon after I’d married her, it was clear that we would become a misery to each other. We parted ways a week after landing in New York.”
“You mean you left her.”
“My dear young lady, she didn’t need me.” Mr. Salvatici’s