Fathom (30 page)

It might have been less easy to understand why any man would love Ybor, but José had his reasons.

It did not remind him of Spain, though that was Bernice’s
assumption. She heard the nattering, clipped Spanish conversations at every street corner and inside every bar, restaurant, and hotel, and she watched José smile to overhear it.

But she seemed not to know or care that many lands speak Spanish and the accents were different from place to place. Just as Bernice could easily have told the difference between voices from England and New England, so too José could tell without trying that the men who surrounded him were born on islands.

The factory workers came and went along the walks, reeking of sweat, tobacco, and the glue that holds cigar bands together. They discussed food and women and rum, and they argued over games of
bolita
that were rigged: no, they were not—well, you know Charlie Wall is a cheater, and everyone says so.

And every block sounded for all the world like the deck of a boat a hundred years before. So they gambled with lottery balls instead of cards; and so they smelled like
cigarros
and cane alcohol instead of sunburn and salt water . . . they were the same kind of men.

Mostly the speech he overheard was made by working-class Cubans, but he heard Puerto Ricans, too, and Dominicans. The patterns of their banter were familiar and friendly, and they echoed in José’s ears as the smoke and stink of the cigar factories wafted through his sinuses.

“What are they saying?” Bernice asked.

José had not been listening, either to her or to the couple she indicated. “What? I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t hear it.”

“I think they were talking about us.”

“And what if they were?”

She made a cranky little pout. “If they were, then I want to know what they were saying.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t important. Or else, it was about you—I’m sure they were only admiring you,” he told her, and he watched
from the corner of his eye as the couple in question disappeared into a market. “You’re beautiful and strange, here. Most of the women in this city are dark, and they work alongside the men making the cigars. They don’t often see women like you.”

“So they
were
talking about me?”

Sometimes it was easier to lie and put it to rest. “Yes, I caught the last of it before they went inside. They wondered what a woman of your class and stature was doing in the workers’ district. That’s all. They thought you were too pretty to belong here, and they wondered if I was your father or lover—that is why they whispered.”

“Oh.” Her mind wandered again, and she tumbled into silence.

She’d been doing this more and more lately, and José was beginning to wonder what was going on behind those brutal blue eyes. It used to be that she told him everything, asked him everything, wanted his company for everything. But in the last week she’d taken to abandoning him and Mother both for her own agenda.

If she told them anything at all, she would make mention of seeking out resources or hunting down old grudges. But usually, she said nothing. She simply left and returned at her leisure, feeling no compunction to explain or account for herself.

He tried to engage her again. “We’re nearly there.”

“At the jewelry place?”

“It’s not a jewelry place, exactly.”

“It’s got a funny name,” she recalled.

“Poppo Efodiazo,” he repeated. “And I’m sure it’s not funny if you speak Greek. It’s a shop for all kinds of things, not merely jewelry.”

“But he makes jewelry, right? I thought you said that’s what he did.”

“Sometimes. More often, I think, he alters and melts jewelry to be sold again. He’s been known to buy stolen goods and transform them. Then he sells them or ships them elsewhere.”

“So why are we using
him
? I don’t like it here,” she said, blanketing her discomfort with a general expression of unhappiness.

“Why not? It’s a beautiful day, the factories are churning, and we have all afternoon to run a simple errand. After we’re done, we can go find a shady spot to have a drink.”

“Because I don’t like it when I don’t know what people are talking about. And I don’t want to sit around and have a drink after this. After this, I want to go back to the water. It’s hot and smelly here, and I don’t like it.”

José opened his mouth to argue, and then changed his mind. He didn’t know what was going on, and he didn’t want to fight with her until he knew exactly what the fight would be about. “Are you upset about something?” he asked instead.

“Like what?” she said with a snap.

“I don’t know; I was hoping you could tell me.”

A wash of crafty interest spread itself across her face, and it startled José. He was pleased to have garnered a reaction from her, but it unsettled him all the same.

She seemed on the verge of saying or asking something, but when she spoke up she didn’t say or ask anything important. All she said was, “I told you, I don’t like it here. That’s all. It’s hot and it stinks. We’re almost there, aren’t we?”

“Yes, yes. I imagine you also want to go back to Mother.”

“I didn’t say
that
.” And something about the way she made her denial made him worry again about the things that moved her.

Most of the time when he looked at her, he was, in a quiet and deliberate sense, looking down on her. After all, she was beautiful—but
not the most brilliant woman he’d ever known. She was spoiled and easily vexed, prone to fits of childish rage and irrational flights of fancy. Bernice was smaller than José, and younger than him, and in her own way, weaker. She didn’t know what to do with her powers. She didn’t know how to read very well and she didn’t speak anything other than her Yankee English with its jagged edges and tortured vowels.

But she had her gifts. People gave her things, and told her things. People offered themselves to her, heart in hand.

With a sharper mind, she could have taken over the world by now
, he thought.
Thank heaven or hell that the gods thought to hobble her, or we would all be lost in her wake
.

At the next corner they turned right and took a sharp twist into a street so narrow it might as well have been an alley. But the buildings had signs, hanging from squeaking chains and painted to advertise services that could be obtained through the recessed doorways that were shuttered against the afternoon heat. One sign had a picture of a bell painted upon it in a golden shade of brown, and the letters beneath spelled out,
POPPO EFODIAZO
.

“That’s it?” Bernice asked.

“That’s it. This is the place.”

He took her hand and led her to the low stone steps. He opened the door for her and held it aside while she clomped up the uneven stairs in her expensive heeled shoes.

She hesitated. “What’s a Greek guy doing here, anyway? I thought this was the Spanish part of town. Why’s he so far from home?”

“This is a . . . commercial part of town,” he told her, resisting the impulse to correct her summing up of the blocks. “This is a business district, and the Greek is a businessman. He has come here because his services are useful in some fashion. And it’s not so
strange, really.” José took her hand and joined her on the threshold, then urged her inside.

The store was cluttered with a rich and diverse array of products. Metal pots and glass vases were hung and displayed side by side with odd pieces of wood furniture and tiny fountains with figures of naked children. Under the main counter’s glass there were more valuable items, gold chains and pendants, earrings that glittered with gems that could have been real, or might have been paste. Along the walls, from floor to ceiling, there were frames upon frames—some holding pictures, some holding mirrors—in all shapes, all sizes, and all patinas. The room smelled like old paper and chemicals.

“Farther up the coast, there are many Greek families that live along the shore,” he mentioned.

“There are?” she asked.

A new voice joined the conversation. “There are,” it said. “They came to dive for sponges.”

Small and swarthy, a bent little man with a shock of black hair came shuffling forward, through a parted curtain that separated the front of the shop from the back. He was wearing a filthy, thick apron made of leather or treated wool—it was too dirty to tell which one at a glance. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles hung from ear to ear, settling heavily on his nose. Where the metal reached the skin, a sunken groove had formed from holding the weight of the thick glass lenses in place.

“Mr. Poppo,” José said.

“His name is Poppo?” Bernice gaped.

“Agatone Pappanophilus,” the storekeeper clarified. “But it’s easier to shorten it, make it simpler for foreign tongues.” He waved down José’s polite apologies and said, “No, it’s all right. I’ve come to understand that it’s silly in English. Most of my customers are Latin, though.”

“Latin? Where’s Latin—”

José interrupted her. “Is the shell finished? You said to check back today, so here we are.”

“Oh, it is finished, yes. It has been finished for days, but it needed to set, or I would’ve tried to send for you.” When he talked, the English was muted and forced; he wrapped the words around his native pronunciations and compelled the letters to line up correctly.

Mr. Poppo took a cane from off the table and planted it down firmly on the cold slate floor. “I think the results will please you. It’s a small piece, but pretty. It’s a tiny conch, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” José nodded, following behind the man, who moved through the room with amazing slowness. “Smaller than you usually find them. But the casting went well, and the piece is sound?”

“Perfectly sound. It’s a gift, didn’t you say?”

“For our Mother,” Bernice piped up, bringing up the rear.

Mr. Poppo stopped and turned around. “The two of you, you’re brother and sister?”

“Oh no, we’re not. The gift is for her mother, my mother-in-law. But the woman has been quite kind to me, and I call her Mother also,” José lied without trying. “It’s an anniversary present.”

“Then I’m surprised you didn’t want it in gold.”

Bernice was going to say something else, but José squeezed her hand. “The gift is one that is meaningful, if not very valuable. She will understand the sentiment behind it, and appreciate it accordingly.”

“Ah,” Mr. Poppo said.

“It’s—,” Bernice was saying again, but José squeezed her hand harder.

He couldn’t explain to her there, on the spot, that Mr. Poppo did not care and did not want to know. The storekeeper dealt with
burglars and thieves for a living, and he neither wanted nor required any explanations.

They ducked around the navy blue curtain and it jingled on its rings.

“Back here.” Mr. Poppo gestured with one hand. “This is where I work. This is where I set it, and after it cooled, I trimmed it and polished it. The end result is quite nice, quite nice indeed.”

He limped forward into a work area that was littered with casts, molds, paints, chisels, and stray bits of leftover material.

The workshop could have worked anything, almost—or so José surmised from his sweeping inspection of the place. There were pigments set up in tightly closed pots with clumpy brushes, just the right colors for falsifying antiques. Here and there, he could see parchments and papers being soaked in a brown solution that smelled faintly of tea and tobacco. Some of the successfully aged documents had been lifted out of their baths and were hanging by the rafters, clipped to a string to dry and wrinkle.

“Back now. Farther. Not this room, but the next.” Mr. Poppo saw José examining the space as he passed through it, and the shopkeeper said, “I do not care if you know how this works. For the price you have paid, you can see all you like. Your ‘Mother’ may be any queen or crone, but if your requests were honorable . . . or legal . . . you would have gone into Tampa and had this done there, through a metalworks, or through a jeweler. So look all you like.”

He reached for the curtain that covered the next doorway and drew it back. A blast of scalding air puffed out.

Mr. Poppo nudged along, scooting with the cane and dragging a twisted foot.

“I know it’s warm,” he said. “But to work with metal, you
must make it very hot. And to make it hot enough to melt, my friends, you must invite yourself into hell.”

José took the curtain and it felt brittle in his hand; it was purple with threads of gold snaking through it. He lifted it aside and fought against his instinct to retreat. The furnace within was shocking in its intensity, and the sheer force of the skin-withering heat was enough to push even the bravest back.

Still holding Bernice’s hand, José blinked his eyes hard and tried to enter, but she held him back. She pulled her fingers away from his and shook her head.

“I can’t,” she swore. “God, that’s awful. Forget it. I’ll wait here. You go get it.”

It was hard to blame her, and since there was no reason for them both to suffer, José entered the backmost chamber without her.

Through watering eyes and a stinging nose, he could tell at a glance why the place was so unbearable. Two tall chimneys released smoke out through the flat roof, but there were otherwise no outlets, no windows. There were no lights except for the fires that simmered here and there, under crucibles and inside ovens.

“Most days,” Mr. Poppo said, “my son and another boy assist me here. We are quite accustomed to the heat, I promise you; but even so, we cannot work here for long. During the winter it is not so bad, but in spring and come summer, there’s nothing to be done about it—except to pretend that we’re devils.”

“I can imagine,” José replied, although he didn’t have to imagine. The heat was sucking him dry, working its blistering waves into every wrinkle of his skin and clothes.

“I doubt you could!” the Greek argued. “No, today the fires are left low because the projects that await them are few, and I am alone. You should imagine it when the furnaces are all alight and
metal pours from mold to mold. It is blinding and terrible, and I call myself Hephaestus, and I command the fire. I make armor for the gods, isn’t that how it goes?”