The mood in the world was changing. There was fresh frivolity, fresh hope, silly songs, rolled-down stockings. The Prince of Wales visited Long Island and spent most of his time dancing, playing polo, or motorboating. A new movie was advertised as featuring "beautiful jazz babes, champagne baths, petting parties in the purple dawn'. Two rich and spoiled young men called Leopold and Loeb murdered an innocent boy named Bobby Franks for the sheer hell of it, and escaped with life sentences.
It was all so different from the summer of 1920. Harry Pakenow, for one, knew just how much, and could never forget.
On Saturday morning, June 14th, Harry was standing in the kitchen of a narrow Victorian terraced house in Bootle, not far from Liverpool, frying himself some breakfast.
He was bespectacled, narrow-chested, with spiky hedgehog hair; but he had an attractive vulnerability about him, an apparent helplessness that made him immediately magnetic to shopgirls and waitresses and even to the fat ladies who stood behind the jellied-eel stalls in Bootle market. He was the kind of young man that almost every woman over thirty wanted to take home and mother.
Harry was originally from Hoboken, New Jersey, although he had been living near Liverpool for so long now that his accent had almost completely flattened out. Just like a Liverpudlian, he said "sters" instead of "stairs', and came out with phrases like "Chance'll be a fine thing" and "Did he heck as like'. In his rolled-up shirtsleeves, yellow suspenders and baggy pants, he looked like any other clerk for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company: he even had mauve indelible ink on his fingers.
Harry fried his two eggs and his single rasher of bacon in his charred-black frying pan with the wonky handle, while outside the window the sheets of the woman who lived upstairs snapped and billowed on the line (she had no husband to speak of, and a ten-year-old boy mysteriously called Romulus who wet the bed). He whistled a jazz refrain that had been popular when he was last in New York in September, 1920: "The Fall I Fell For You'.
From the next room, a girl's voice called, "Harry? Have you seen my pink shoes?"
"You left them in the outhouse," he called back. "There was dogshit on them."
"Oh, bugger it. Didn't you clean them for me?"
Harry didn't answer. He turned off the gas, and then carried the frying pan across to the kitchen table, where an empty plate was waiting, already flanked by two doorstep slices of bread and butter and a mug of bright orange tea. He shovelled his eggs and bacon onto his plate, and then sniffed and sat down to eat. He would take a mouthful of egg, a big bite of bread, and then wash everything down with tea, in that order. He was indistinguishable from any other British working man at his breakfast.
"I'll be late, Harry," said a pretty young girl in a short pink and white dress, hopping into the kitchen in one slipper. She had bright blonde hair, spiky eyelashes, and two vivid spots of rouge on her cheeks. She had read how to make herself up like that in Movie Secrets.
"If you think I'm going to go scraping dogshit off your shoes right in the middle of breakfast, you can think again," Harry told her.
"But it's five past eight already. Mrs Carson will kill me."
"Let her kill you. If she kills you, you can sue."
"Oh, you're not much bleeding help, are you? I shall have to change my dress now, and wear my green ones."
"Green," said Harry, mopping up egg-yolk, as if that was the most obnoxious word he'd heard for a week.
But when the pretty young girl came dancing in a few moments later, all ready for work in a green shimmy dress and a green headband, Harry reached out and grabbed her arm, sat her down on his lap and kissed her.
"One day," he told her, staring at her intently through his bacon-spattered spectacles, "one day you'll understand just how much you've done for me, Miss Janice Bignor, of Bootle."
Janice tugged at his hair, and kissed him back. "It's mutual, innit?" she told him. "Now, I've got to run for that bleeding bus, or else she really will kill me."
Harry followed her to the front door in his carpet slippers and watched her run down the sloping windy road to the bus stop on the corner. The woman next door, with a scarf on her head and a I hanging out of her mouth, was scratching at her corsets in her front window. When she saw Harry looking, she scowled. Harry smiled and went back inside.
He always felt that the house was quiet and unsettled without Janice. Whenever she went to work on Saturday mornings, leaving him alone, he would prowl around for almost half an hour, taking three times as long as usual to clear up his breakfast plate and to tidy a narrow brass bed in which they slept together in what had once been the "best parlour'. There was still "best parlour" wallpaper on the walls—faded brown flowers, with a green and brown border a way round.
Today, before he went back to the kitchen, he went into the bedroom and pulled out from under the bed a small tin box with a padlock. He found the key in his trouser pocket, and unlocked it and then laid out on the rumpled bedspread the three most important papers in his whole life as if they were tarot cards.
On the right was a third-class ticket for passage to New York on the SS Arcadia's maiden voyage, on Tuesday, June 17th. In the centre was an American passport, its olive-green cover circled by teacup stains. On the left was a yellowed newspaper clipping from The New York Times of September 17th, 1920.
The newspaper clipping described how at 11.59 in the morning September 16th, a horse-drawn wagon loaded with dynamite and scrap iron had exploded at Broad and Wall Streets, outside the offices J. P. Morgan & Company, the merchant bankers, killing thirty-eight people and injuring hundreds more. Windows had been smashed for blocks around, and an iron bolt had been driven through the window of the Bankers Club, on the thirty-fourth floor of the Equitable Building. The street had been glossed red with the blood of the dead and the dying.
Harry touched each of these papers with his fingertips, in the way that mediums familiarise themselves with their tarot cards. This, the explosion on Wall Street, is what came before. This, the passport, represents the means to the end. And this, the third-class ticket on the Arcadia's maiden voyage, is the significator.
Outraged, the press and the police had assumed at once that the Wall Street explosion bad been the work of Bolshevists. Their wild investigations had led them around and around in circles for days, and then months, and then years. Detectives had discovered that the iron bolts which had penetrated the buildings all around were window sash-weights, cut in two. Next, they had examined every single fragment of the remaining scrap-iron, including the shoes of the blown-up horse. The most promising piece had been the knob of a safe door, which had been traced by a particularly dogged detective from the day of its manufacture, from America to France, and then back again. But the trail had gone cold in Hoboken, New Jersey, at a scrap dealer on Willow Avenue. He sold scrap by the fifty-ton load, "Who knows what they're going to use it for?"
It had taken a long time for the echoes of the Wall Street explosion to fade away. But now the Red Scare of 1919 and the early 1920s was old news, and the Communist purges first incited by A. Mitchell Paltner, President Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, were filtering for lack of genuine evidence against the suspected revolutionaries, and even more from lack of public interest. Jazz, sex, Rudolph Valentino, and the Ku Klux Klan were all much more exciting than Bolshevists with beards. The thirty-eight victims of the blast had long been buried, the injured had recovered, and a supposed Red who had tried to blow up A. Mitchell Palmer's house had only succeeded in blowing himself up instead.