“You had some fright, miss, type to make you drop drawers and run for cover, I’d wager,” he teased gently. “Zachariah Lane, at your service. They call me Rye. Welcome to the Hotel Arcadia.”
There had always been Negroes in Harlem. But around 1905, some of the streets started dancing in tap steps. Singing the blues. By 1911, the year now in question, the shindig was well and truly in swing. Blacks poured into Harlem from Missouri, Alabama, Texas, Kentucky. True homes in Central Harlem disintegrated—apartments were divided into honeycomb hives, families of six former sharecroppers stuffed into bunk beds. They spilled out, naturally, everyplace. They tipped department-store hats from Lord & Taylor at their sweethearts, got into fisticuffs on rum-swilling Saturday nights. The usual.
The one in front of me was the most magnetic person other than Nicolo I’d ever encountered.
“I have to see Mr. Salvatici,” I begged. “Can you tell him Nobody is here?”
“Pardon?” Rye’s smile widened in a question.
“Sorry, Alice James.” I started to cry, curling into myself. “Or Nobody. Just . . . he can decide.”
Rye disappeared. My eyes swam at the orderly bank of lemon oil–polished mailboxes and the wall of keys. A clerk behind the reception desk glared, stroking his chin as if he smelled something amiss. The aroma of slashed entrails enveloped me again and I retched helplessly at the carpet.
I lost consciousness, this time with commitment. When I woke, I rested on a tapestry-printed couch in the finest hotel room I’d ever seen—slipper-soft carpet, a sideboard weighted with glassware, paintings featuring dogs that would have considered the Step Right beneath pissing on.
Mr. Salvatici loomed into view. His shirtsleeves were buttoned without collar or cuffs, as if he’d been interrupted bathing. Damp sable hair fell over eerily pale blue eyes ringed with darker steel. He held up a tiny brown bottle.
“Miss James, I have smelling salts.”
The stark reek of ammonia deluged my sinuses.
Please, God, take this day away. If only it were yesterday, and the invitations for tomorrow all canceled.
“That’s better.” Mr. Salvatici turned to draw up a chair. “My dear young lady, whatever has happened, I’ll do all I can to assist.”
“They went after Giorgio Benenati again,” I heard a voice like mine saying. “His nemicos* won. He’s dead.”
I didn’t say, His neck was slashed so deep that when Nicolo pulled him out of the barrel, it flopped, and the only thing attaching his head was a flap of skin.
I absolutely didn’t say, They took a razor and cut off his nose.
They took his lips.
His tongue.
His eyelids.
What good were they to anyone save Mr. Benenati?
The two Benenatis and I had followed Nazario to a crack in the world wedged between a poultry warehouse with torn chicken-wire windows and a bleak row of peeling billboards. A weeping charwoman gestured helplessly at a barrel with a leg sticking out. Gore oozed from the cracks between the staves. While Nicolo pulled, his mother screamed, and soon she was surrounded by identical women with dirtied aprons and patched head scarves, all reaching for her like lost souls.
Mr. Salvatici said nothing after I finished. He brought me his jacket when I started to shiver, and I learned he smelled of the cigarettes he smoked and of a subtler, cleaner perfume like starch.
Or money.
“Come with me, Miss James,” he directed, rising.
“Why?” I huddled farther into the coat.
His eyes narrowed to match the slit of his lips. There was, strangely, no sternness in it. I could have been watching a lizard sunning itself on a rock.
“Because I want to see that you can.”
He offered his arm. We left his hotel room and took a pretty birdcage elevator upward, floors clicking past like so many missed chances. When we stopped, to my surprise, we weren’t in a hallway but in a small, eerily unmarked room. My escort unlocked the door of this and we stepped out onto the roof.
All Harlem lay spread out before the Hotel Arcadia. To the north, the tall buildings grew stoop-shouldered like old men. To the southwest lay the Park, hugely vacant. In the meadows between tenement buildings, I could see the flickering of maybe a dozen All Hallows’ Eve bonfires. The kids would be roasting chestnuts and jacket potatoes as their parents offered hopeful prayers to the constellations above.
Mr. Salvatici placed my hands on the railing. He then went to open a wire-walled dovecote, and I heard muted cooing. A flock of birds burst forth from the enclosure. Mr. Salvatici apparently had a surprising