Everett goes to offer her the sock puppet for comfort, he realizes that in the rush to jump the train he’d forgotten it back where they’d waited.
“It’s gone, little one,” he says, patting the warm melon of her head. “Your puppet. Those people. That home. All of it. Gone.”
She wails for hours.
THE CITY
ON MR. HOLT’S dime, Harvey Lomax takes a suite on the fifteenth floor of the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, high above the wide, cobalt-blue lake. It’s luxuriously outfitted, including a sitting room and a private lavatory with a clamshell tub. Typically, Lomax wouldn’t dream of incurring such an expense, but Mr. Holt has assured him that he can’t be expected to conduct his important search while sleeping in cramped, unwholesome quarters.
Lomax knows he’ll give himself away if he’s wearing his usual tailored three-piece, so he purchases some worker’s dungarees and a canvas shirt from a street vendor. He pulls them on, then takes a fistful of earth from the lily bed out front of his hotel and rubs the soil over his face and clothes, drawing curious glances from the valets. Properly disguised, Lomax makes enquiries at flophouses, especially those near the rail yards. To each clerk he slips a dollar bill with the name of his hotel written on it, instructing them to keep an eye out for a derelict with a baby. “Most are running away from them,” one remarks skeptically. “Not carting them along.”
“That you, Everett?” Lomax says to a pram-pushing, dark-haired man of the correct height. Of all the identification gambits he’s employed while collecting debts over the years, this is the most effective by a mile. Yet the man doesn’t flinch, and on closer inspection, Lomax sees that his pram is full of empty tin cans and machine parts.
That night, Lomax cables Mr. Holt and regretfully informs him that his first day in Toronto has been unfruitful. His employer’s reply is swift:
IVE PUT MY TRUST IN YOU MR LOMAX STOP DONT LET ME DOWN STOP RJ
Each day, Lomax completes a circuit of hotels, flophouses, and taverns. The hours of pounding the pavement are murder on his back, and by day’s end the lightning coils and snaps, nearly doubling him over on the street. To make it back to his hotel, he’s forced to smoke up the last of the cigars, judiciously, taking only a few puffs at a time. Once they’re gone, he’s too ashamed to ask Mr. Holt to send more. So he knuckles down, buys a pair of good loafers, and soldiers on. But the city grows ever more gloomy around him: iron-clad clouds drag their grey bellies across the roofs of brick tenements; a cripple pulls himself around upon a scrap of automobile tire; a woman thrusts her head into a trash can and screams. The city is a maze of sorts, he realizes, where souls wander and collapse, damned either by something they’ve done or by something they’re unable to do.
Each night, before soaking his ravaged muscles in the clamshell tub, he dutifully cables Holt with the same disappointing report. And although he notes a compounding curtness to his employer’s replies, Lomax assures himself that with some persistence, his break will come. At the end of his first week, while Lomax is eating at a lunch counter, a Mountie who’d been schoolmates with Lavern takes the stool beside him. The Mountie mentions in passing that the brother of a senator was recently attacked by a tramp in an apple orchard in Ontario, and that the tramp claimed to have an infant in his care. “CN Rail detectives are rounding up vagrants all down the line,” the Mountie says, “raiding hobo jungles, checking dive-hotel registers. A hundred bums have been dragged in. So far no baby’s been found.”
Lomax hurries back to his suite, where he paces the carpet. If Greenwood, the baby, or the journal are taken into custody by railroad detectives, it will be disastrous for his employer. But if the beating took place in Ontario, then that means Greenwood was indeed on his way west. So Lomax cables Mr. Holt, delicately offering up the news as a positive development, and he’s relieved when Holt seems pleased. Lomax vows to triple his efforts to find Greenwood before the Mounties do.
After dinner that evening, a bellhop brings another telegram to his door:
BEEN OVR A WEEK STOP TWINS BDAY COME AND GONE STOP HARVEY JR HAS CROUPE STOP ANCLE LOST TWO TEETH STOP NO COINS TO PUT UNDER PILLOW STOP