By their third day in the tent city, food had grown scarce but optimistic rumors spread wildly: a Red Cross steamer was coming up the Thames; the Americans had been defeated at sea. Caroline listened to the rumors indifferently. She’d heard rumors before. It was enough that the fire seemed at last to be burning itself out, with the help of a frigid spring rain. People talked about rebuilding, though privately Caroline thought the word ludicrous: to reconstruct the reconstruction of a vanished world, what folly.
She spent an afternoon wandering among the smoldering campfires and fetid trench latrines, searching for her aunt and uncle. She regretted having made so few friends in London, having lived such an insular existence. She would have liked to see a familiar face, but there were no familiar faces, not until she came across Mrs. de Koenig, the woman who had looked after Lily so often. Mrs. de Koenig was glum and alone, wrapped in a streaming tarpaulin, her hair knotted and wet; at first she failed to recognize Caroline.
But when Caroline asked about Alice and Jered, the older woman shook her head miserably. “They waited too long. The fire came down Market Street like a live thing.”
Caroline gasped. “They died?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you certain?”
“Certain as rain.” Her red-rimmed eyes were mournful. “I’m sorry, Miss.”
Something is always stolen, Caroline thought as she trudged back through the mud and rotting plants. Something is always taken away. In the rain it was possible to cry, and she cried freely. She wanted to be finished crying when she had to face Lily again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Fireworks bloomed over the Washington Monument, celebrating the victory in the Atlantic. Sudden lights colored the Reflecting Pool. The night air smelled of gunpowder; the crowd was gleeful and wild.
“You’ll have to leave town,” Crane said, smiling vaguely, hands in his pockets. He walked with a Brahman slouch, at once imperial and self-mocking. “I assume you know that.”
When had Vale last seen a public celebration? A few halfhearted Fourth of July fêtes since the strange summer of 1912. But the victory in the Atlantic had rung across the country like the tolling of a bell. In this throng, at night, they wouldn’t be recognized. It was possible to talk.
He said, “I would have liked time to pack.”
Crane, unlike the gods, would tolerate a complaint.
“No time, Elias. In any case, people like us don’t need worldly possessions. We’re more like, ah, monks.”
The celebration would go on until morning. A glorious little war. Teddy Roosevelt would have approved. The British had surrendered after devastating losses to their Atlantic fleet and their Darwinian colonies, fearing an attack on Kitchener’s rump government in Canada. The terms of the victory weren’t harsh: a weapons embargo, official endorsement of the Wilson Doctrine. The conflict had lasted all of a week. Not so much war, Vale thought, as Diplomacy by Other Means, and a warning to the Japanese should they choose to turn their martial attention westward.
Of course, the war had served another purpose, the gods’ purpose. Vale supposed he would never know the sum of that purpose. It might be no more than the increase of enmity, violence, confusion. But the gods were generally more incisive than that.
There had been a sidebar in the Post: British nationals and sympathizers were being questioned in connection with the murder of Smithsonian director Eugene Randall. Vale’s name hadn’t been mentioned, though it would probably make the morning edition. “You ought to thank me,” he told Crane, “for taking the fall.”
“Colorful expression. You aren’t, of course. You’re too useful. Think of it this way: you’re discarding a persona. The police will find you dead in the ashes of your town house, or at least a few suggestive bones and teeth. Case closed.”
“Whose bones will they be?”
“Does it matter?”
He supposed not. Some other victim. Some impediment to the due and proper evolution of the cosmos.
Crane said, “Take this.” It was an envelope containing a rail ticket and a roll of hundred-dollar bills. The destination printed on the ticket was New Orleans. Vale had never been to New Orleans. New Orleans might as well have been East Mars, as far as he was concerned.
“Your train leaves at midnight,” Crane said.
“What about you?”
“I’m protected, Elias.” He smiled. “Don’t worry about me. Perhaps we’ll meet again, in a decade or two or three.”
God help us. “Do you ever wonder — is there any end to it?”
“Oh, yes,” Crane said. “I think we’ll see the end of it, Elias, don’t you?”
The fireworks reached a crescendo. Stars erupted to the roar of cannonade: blue, violet, white. A good omen for the new Harding administration. Crane would flourish, Vale thought, in modern Washington. Crane would rise like a rocket.
And I will sink into obscurity, and maybe that’s for the best.
New Orleans was warm, almost sultry; the spring became tropical. It was a strange town, Vale thought, barely American. It looked transported from some French Caribbean colony, all lacy ironwork and thunder and soft patois.
He took an apartment under an assumed name in a seedy but not slummy part of town. He paid his rent with a fraction of Crane’s money and began scouting second-story offices where he might conduct a little spiritualist business. He felt strangely free, as if he had left his god in the city of Washington. Not true — he understood that — but he savored the feeling while it lasted.
His craving for morphine was not physical, and perhaps that was part of the package of immortality, but he remembered the intoxication fondly and spent a few evenings trolling the jazz bars in search of a connection. He was walking home through a starry, windy night when two strangers jumped him. The men were muscular, their blunt faces shadowed under navy watch caps. They dragged him into an alley behind a tattoo shop.
They must have been god-ridden, Vale decided later. Nothing else made sense. One had a bottle, one had a length of threaded steel rod. They demanded nothing, took nothing. They worked strictly on his face. His immortal skin was slashed and gouged, his immortal skull fractured in several places. He swallowed several of his immortal teeth.
He did not, of course, die.
Swathed in bandages, sedated, he heard a doctor discuss his case with a nurse in a languid Louisiana drawl. A miracle he survived. No one will recognize him after this, God knows.
Not a miracle, Vale thought. Not even a coincidence. The gods who had closed his skin to the morphine needle in Washington could just as easily have staved off these cutting blows. He had been taken because he never would have volunteered.
No one will recognize him.
He healed quickly.
A new city, a new name, a new face. He learned to avoid mirrors. Physical ugliness was not a significant impediment to his work.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Guilford found the Bodensee where a glacial stream entered the lake, frigid water coursing over slick black pebbles. He followed the shoreline slowly, meticulously, riding the fur snake he had named Evangeline. “Evangeline” for no reason save that the name appealed to him; the animal’s gender was a mystery. Evangeline had foraged more successfully than Guilford had over the last week, and her six splined hooves covered ground more efficiently than his toothpick legs.