Iron Cast (17 page)

“Cor and I will find a way to fix this.” Ada rounded the counter, reaching for her mother's hands. “We always do.”

Nyah's expression hardened. “So your father and I must always be afraid for you? We must pretend we don't know what you are doing at that club? António is in prison for a crime he didn't commit, while our daughter uses her talent to be a criminal. We tried to raise you to give more than you take. I see now that we failed.”

Ada recoiled and dropped her hands. Her mother began to furiously scrub the pan she had just retrieved, even though it was already clean.

“I'm trying to help you.” Ada's voice, when she finally found it, was feeble and wavering. “I've done all this for you.”

But she wasn't sure that was true.

“It is not your place to protect us,” her mother said. “We should have been protecting you—from that club, and from Johnny Dervish.”

“Johnny saved us, Mama.” Unexpected heat chased her words. “When they took Papa away, Johnny was the only reason we didn't starve.”

“You do not think I could have provided for us?”

“I didn't say—”

“I am lonely, and I miss my husband, but I am not weak,” said her mother, throwing down the dishrag.
“Sina hofu.
”

Ada didn't recognize the words in her mother's native tongue. She was quiet, waiting, but Nyah didn't translate for her. Ada wondered if her mother was tired of translating for a child who never learned, for a daughter who listened to stories and sang lullabies in Swahili but knew nothing else about the world her mother had given up. For the first time, she wondered if she missed more than just her husband.

Nyah turned her head to look at Ada, her palms planted firmly on the edge of the sink, her shoulders hunched like she was a lioness preparing to leap.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you so much, but this is not how things were meant to be.”

Ada wasn't an idiot. She knew that the tale of the queen from the beautiful, wild lands of northern Mozambique and the foreign prince who fell in love with her was a romanticized version of the truth, removed from the context of four hundred years of colonization, but her mother had taken such care in preserving the tale that Ada couldn't bring herself to imagine anything different. And this wasn't how that story was supposed to end.

“I'm sorry,” Ada said.

“Go back to the Cast Iron,” Nyah said, waving her hand. She was not looking at Ada now. “Maybe you are safer there, and that is where you want to be.”

The words were blows that only her mother was capable of delivering. Ada closed her eyes briefly. She knew she should stay, apologize more, make things right somehow. But she was hurt and angry and the apartment suddenly felt very small.

She gave her mother a hug and left without another word.

The walk back to the Cast Iron was bitingly cold, and Ada concentrated on her icy nose to avoid dwelling on anything that had just happened. She didn't think she was being followed, but it was hard to know for sure.

It should never have gone this far. She and Corinne had lived and worked for years in peace, pulling the occasional con when business was slow without the regs being any wiser. But the Harvard Bridge had tipped the scales. Councilman Turner's proposed bill for banning hemopathic activity had suddenly gained unprecedented support, and it had passed two months to the day after the Bengali banker job. Corinne insisted that the law would have passed anyway, but Ada knew it was their fault. They had reached too high and brought a storm down on the hemopaths of Boston. There would be no peace for them anymore.

Ada cupped her hands over her mouth and nose and blew into them. Her mind still turned in queasy circles as she opened the alley door and stepped into the relative warmth of the Cast Iron's storage room. When she saw Charlie there, leaning against the wall and chatting with Gordon like it was any old day, her mind went blank.

“Morning,” he said.

Ada blinked.

“Morning,” she said, after a few seconds' delay.

“Can we take a walk?” he asked.

Ada studied his features in the dusky light, the crinkling at the
corners of his eyes from his habitual grin, the crooked length of his nose, though he swore he'd never broken it. He didn't look like he wanted to argue with her. He looked relaxed. She nodded.

“You kids be careful,” Gordon said, spitting out a sunflower seed.

It was the first time Ada had seen Gordon express concern about any of the Cast Iron's goings-on. She wasn't sure how to respond to him. Charlie gave him a cheerful wave and opened the door.

“See you later, Gordon, old pal,” he said.

Gordon made a sound somewhere between a snort and a grunt and spat out another seed. It was the closest to a farewell that Ada had ever received from him. When she told that to Charlie, he just laughed.

“Gordon? He's a big softie. Just ask him about his cat sometime. He'll melt like butter in June.”

Ada hadn't known that Gordon owned a cat. She stared at Charlie's profile, trying to detect some hint of sarcasm, but it wasn't there.

“What?” he asked, looking at her. “I got something in my teeth?”

She shook her head. They walked toward the street, elbows brushing every few steps. Ada wanted to take his hand, but she wasn't sure how he would react to that. Their last conversation still hung between them, barbed and broken.

“I didn't expect to see you today,” Ada said at last, unable to stand the silence.

“I heard about what happened last night. I was worried about you.”

Ada hugged herself against the rising wind. Across the street a nun was leading a gaggle of orphans down the sidewalk. Trailing a
block behind was an elderly couple, both with canes. The man was chuckling and clutching his hat in the wind. The woman reached out with a shaky hand and brushed something invisible from his shoulder. Ada looked away from the simple intimacy of the moment and sucked in a short breath. She stopped walking and pulled Charlie to face her. The question burned her throat, but she had to ask it.

“Charlie, was it—was it Carson? At the docks?” She searched his face. Corinne swore that deception was always in the eyebrows, but Ada wasn't sure what to look for.

Charlie shook his head. She didn't know if he meant that it wasn't Carson or that he didn't know.

“There's a lot they don't tell us, Ada,” he said.

“They?”

“Carson. Johnny Dervish. I know it feels like a family sometimes, but it's not. You can't think that.”

“What do you mean?”

He broke away from her gaze and stared down the sidewalk for a few seconds. His chapped lips were parted slightly as he gathered his thoughts. The sky today was a pale blue. The sun gave no warmth but glistened on windows and lampposts in sparks of pure white. A couple of blocks away, a trolley rolled along the track, its bell clanging as it passed through the intersection.

“Come out with me today,” Charlie said. He grabbed her hand with a suddenness that startled her.

“Today?” she echoed. “Where?”

“We'll figure it out,” he said. “Don't you want to get away from this—just for a while?”

Ada hesitated.

“We don't have to talk about anything important,” Charlie
said, rubbing his thumb across her palm. “I just want to be with you, Ada.”

She wanted to be with him too. She wanted everything to be easy again, like it was before the asylum, before the Bengali banker. Maybe it could be, just for tonight.

“Okay,” she said. “Let's go.”

Corinne ended up spending most of the morning on the phone with her mother, trying to convince her that this unnamed friend Mrs. Wells had never heard of was in dire need of Corinne's tender ministrations and could not be abandoned for another day at least. In retrospect it was the “tender ministrations” that made the story difficult to believe. Constance Wells knew her daughter too well for that.

With her mother finally appeased enough to not come after her, Corinne spent the rest of the day ranging around the basement of the Cast Iron, picking up books that she could barely concentrate on and pretending to straighten up the common room, though she really just shifted the mess and rearranged the piles. All this occurred under Gabriel's vaguely amused watch from his seat on the couch. She noticed that he hadn't moved much since making his way there from the closet with the cot, though he swore that his wound didn't hurt that badly.

Corinne wanted to go out and do something, but there was nowhere to go. She also felt strangely guilty at the thought of abandoning Gabriel, even though she was under no obligation to tend to him, and he probably wouldn't have let her if she'd tried.

She had told him about her plan to go to the theater tonight with Ada, mostly because she figured that being able to disapprove of something would aid his convalescing. Gabriel disapproved,
but he didn't bother trying to dissuade her. And when he calmly insisted that he was coming along, she put up only a token amount of resistance. “You probably won't be able to walk that far anyway. And I hate taxis.”

In reply, Gabriel struggled to his feet. Corinne forced herself not to jump out of her chair to help him. She concentrated on glaring at him in a way that might convey how stupid she thought he was.

“I'm fine,” he told her, for the eighth time that day. “I need to go check on my mother.”

“I'll go with you.”

“No.”

His voice was even, but the word had a finality to it that gave Corinne pause. She remembered how carefully Ada guarded her mother's home. Gabriel walked to the stairs with only the slightest hitch in his gait, and Corinne decided he was probably okay to hobble home on his own. The wound on his side didn't have that many stitches, after all.

“We leave at six,” she called after him. “Wear a suit.”

He lifted a hand in acknowledgment and disappeared, slowly, up the stairs.

“And try not to look armed,” Corinne shouted as an afterthought.

Gabriel responded by slamming the panel shut. Corinne picked up the book she'd been trying to read, but even in solitude she couldn't focus on the words. When Saint crept out of his room, she was glad for the distraction. He kept to himself these days, which made him easy to forget about. Saint didn't say anything to her, just slipped past her chair to the coffee table and snatched up an egg that she didn't remember seeing during her attempt at tidying.

“Where did that come from?” she asked.

He looked at her like a preying wolf had just spoken to him, and he cupped the egg protectively.

“It's for a painting,” he said, not really answering her question. “The—the composition is wrong.”

Corinne wanted to say more, like how odd it was that eggs seemed to be turning up all over the Cast Iron, as if there were a stealthy chicken on the loose. But she remembered she was supposed to hate him and looked back at her book. Saint scurried away. Once he was gone, Corinne twisted in her chair and leaned over the back as far as she could. She could just barely see past the doorframe into Saint's room. He was pulling a painting from the easel and replacing it with a blank canvas. Stretching over the chair back a couple more inches, Corinne saw that the finished painting was of the common room, rendered in perfect detail, down to the rips in the couches and the clutter on the coffee table.

Saint shut the door—possibly he had noticed her not-so-subtle spying. Corinne dropped back down in her chair and made herself dutifully turn the pages of her book until half past five, when the phone in Johnny's office began to ring. She sprang free from the chair and ran to grab it. Maybe Johnny was calling with news.

It was Ada.

“Hey, Cor. Don't be mad.”

“Something wrong?”

“No, nothing.”

There were muffled voices in the background. Corinne thought she heard music.

“We just lost track of time,” Ada continued. “I'm not going to make it to the play tonight.”

“Who's we? Where are you?”

“Charlie and I are in the South End. You don't need me, do you?”

Corinne wanted to tell her that she
did
need her, even though that wasn't strictly true. Mostly she just didn't understand why Ada would rather go to what sounded like a party with Charlie than help them figure out who was behind the shooting at the docks.

“I'll live,” Corinne said. “You sure you're okay?”

“Everything's copacetic. Don't go alone, though. Take Gabriel.”

“I hope you realize that making me attend a play alone with Gabriel is cruel and unusual punishment.”

“I owe you one, Cor. Gotta run.”

The line went dead, and Corinne dropped the receiver into its cradle with a sigh. She returned to the common room, trying to convince herself that she wasn't upset. Ada had begged off things before, and Corinne understood that. The theater district was a welcoming place relative to the rest of Boston, but society could stomach only so much progressiveness before it revolted. A girl who was both black and a hemopath could not expect a carefree evening on the town, which was something Ada had to remind Corinne of occasionally, as Corinne preferred to forget the ugly truth of it.

This was different, though. Two members of Johnny's crew were dead, another wounded, and Johnny still hadn't returned. Why did Ada insist on pretending that everything wasn't falling apart? Corinne kept telling herself she wasn't angry all the way across the common room and to Saint's doorway. She knocked on the door twice, and after a few seconds he creaked it open, dripping paintbrush in hand.

“You're coming to the Mythic with us tonight,” she said. “Find a suit.”