“What’s your shoe size?” I whisper.
“What?”
“Your shoe. The size.”
“8½ B. Why?”
“Forget it,” I whisper.
Epstein begins taking clothes off, and I begin putting them on. “Time did not mention the exact length of the train,” he whispers. “But it did say there would be a locomotive and four cars.”
“Uh-huh.” I have already put on the raccoon coat, and am now wrapping Hester’s muffler around my throat It smells faintly of Muguet du Bois.
“It’s my educated guess,” Epstein whispers, “that if you detonated your blast when the second car is in the middle of the bridge, you’ll get the whole train with plenty of yardage to spare. Do you agree?”
“Yes, I guess so.” I put on the mittens. They are sticky and hot.
“Did you wire the bridge?”
“Yes.”
He hands me the rubber mask, and I pull it on over my head. It is even stickier and hotter than the mittens, and it reeks of Epstein’s aftershave lotion.
“Good luck,” he whispers. “Sara’s waiting for you.”
“Did you talk to anyone?” I ask.
“What?”
“Your voice, your voice.”
“I slurred my words. Like a drunk. Returning graduates usually…
“Yes, I understand.”
“Good luck,” he says again.
I move out of the garage and walk swiftly to the back of the house. The sounds of the party are closer now. I open the kitchen door. Hester’s black housekeeper (Mrs. Hollis, I presume) looks at me and says nothing. I take a deep breath and walk through the kitchen and into the living room.
It is fifteen minutes to midnight.
They are all masked, and I do not know who they are. There is music floating from a phonograph and they flit past me in glittering costumes and I have no clues to their separate hidden identities as they go by.
A tall skeleton, white bones against black cloth, grinning skull mask and black eyes burning in hole sockets bends over me as I mix myself a drink, and says, “Who are you, mister?” and I say, “Guess,” and he dances away, showing me his back and the gaps where the snappers on his costume are imperfectly fastened. There is a woman, I think she is a woman, a matriarch in long peach gown and wide-brimmed hat, parasol slung over her arm, chalk-white face and brilliantly rouged lips. She stalks me relentlessly about the room as I wander from group to group hoping to recognize, and at last her dowager’s limping gait brings her to my side and she leans into my ear and whispers, “Did it go well?” and I answer, Yes, and move away waving my W.M.U. pennant
Sara is Mata Hari, I catch glimpses of her as she wanders through the crowd, the only face I recognize, and that only barely. She wears a black silk dress cut low in the front, black-dyed ostrich feathers at the neckline and the hem. She has rented a black wig, bangs on the forehead, sleek and straight in the back where it falls away to the nape of her neck, long black false eyelashes, heavy blue eye shadow, dark lipstick, a black beauty spot at the corner of her mouth, a cigarette holder clenched between her teeth. She looks dark and mysterious and brooding and secretive, and she is drinking far too much and moving from one masked man to another, engaging each in conversation, flirting outrageously, seemingly unaware of my presence.
He appears at my side suddenly, the Lone Ranger in white hat and black mask, silver bullets in a cartridge belt, six-guns holstered. The Indian beside him, wearing feathers and war paint, fringed buckskin jacket and pants, leather mocassins, beaded belt hung with dagger and tomahawk, whispers, “Can you notice I’m not wearing a bra?” and both merge with the crowd. Someone murmurs, “Who was that masked man, Minnie?” and on the following crest of laughter, the Hunchback of Notre Dame crouches toward me, fixes me with a baleful cataracted glare, harelip pulled back over stained, crooked teeth, and cackles, “Five minutes to midnight, almost time.” A goblin, a gnome, the seeming issue of Quasimodo himself, materializes and babbles in a high excited voice, “Happy Halloween, happy Halloween!” I turn from him swiftly to find someone I recognize at last, Jean Trench, wetting her painted lips with a pink pointed tongue, wearing a black lace chemise, abundant white breasts bulging over its restraining top, black garters biting into her thighs, black net stockings, black patent leather high-heeled shoes.
“Hello, Jean,” I say. “You’re not wearing a mask.”
“Who the hell are you?” she says.
“Guess,” I say in the same drunken slur. “Where’s Victor?”
“Here someplace,” she says. “He came as a sultan. He’s a goddamn sultan.”
Sara approaches with a sidelong glide, skids to a stop before us, and lifts her half-empty glass so that it is just below Jean’s nose. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, miss?” she asks.
“What?” Jean says.
“Fuck off,” Sara tells her.
“What are you supposed to be?” Jean says.
“A pregnant college girl. Fuck off, I told you.”
“Charming,” Jean says, and swivels off, glancing back at me and wetting her lips once again.
“Charming,” Sara mimicks, and flits away toward the bar, moving in a blur of black ostrich feathers and silk, gleaming rhinestone bracelets, tilted cigarette holder, to embrace the portly sultan who must be Victor Koblenz, advising him as she kisses the tip of his mask nose that his sword is coming out of his scabbard, does he want everyone to see his sword that way in a public place? Koblenz is flabbergasted. He checks his sword, he checks his fly, he glances up quickly to beg elucidation, but Sara is gone again, quicksilver tonight, manic and cruel.
There is no mistaking Hester when she approaches. She is wearing the costume of a shapeless scarecrow, shabby dark suit with straw poking from collar and cuff, a stitched cotton mask covering her face, an old gray fedora jammed down around her ears. But there is something about the walk, something about the stiff carriage and erect head that suggest steel within the straw. The baggy trousers are, after all, trousers nonetheless, and Hester wears her balls like a wrestler.
“Is it you?” she says.
“It is I.”
“Good,” she says, and nods. “Is the party big enough for you?”
“Quite nice, thank you.”
“We try to please.”
“Hester,” I tell her, “I hope I never have the pleasure of working with you again.”
“My, my,” she says. “After all the nice things I said about you last night.”
“A momentary lapse, I’m sure.”
“On the contrary,” she says. “I meant them quite sincerely.”
“In which case, I thank you quite sincerely. I still hope I never see you again.” Because she cannot see my face behind the Old Grad’s mask, I nod for emphasis and wave the pennant twice. “Weglowski wants to be paid early tomorrow morning.”
“Epstein is in charge of money matters.”