Plaquette frowned, attempting to recall if she’d heard the grate and clank of the safe’s door closing on the day’s proceeds, the money and precious jewels Msieur usually hid away there. Sometimes she could remember what had happened around her during the last few minutes of her trance.
Not today.
Only the vague outlines of its windows broke the darkening workroom’s walls. And beneath where she knew the showroom door stood, a faint, blurry smear gleamed dully, vanishing remnant of l’heure bleue. She must go home now. Before Msieur returned with his chocolate pie and his unctuous wooing.
She considered the showroom door a moment longer. But the door from there led right to the street. People would be bound to see her escape. The workroom door, then; the delivery entrance that led to the alleyway. She twisted to face it.
Msieur had reinforced this door the same summer when, frightened of robbers, he sank his iron safe beneath the workroom’s huge oak cabinet. It was faced outside with bricks, a feeble attempt at concealment that made it heavy – too heavy for Plaquette alone to budge. Plaquette, however, was not alone.
Marshalling the George into position, she set him to kick down the thick workroom door. The George walked forward a few more feet, then stopped there in the alley, lacking for further commands. A dumb mechanical porter with no more sense than a headless chicken.
Though she hadn’t planned it, Plaquette found she knew what she wanted to do next. She rushed back to her bench. Claude cheerfully rocked after her. She erased all the corrections that she’d meticulously made to Msieur’s notes. She scribbled in new ones, any nonsense that came to mind. Without her calculations Msieur would never work out the science of making a wireless iron George. Someone else eventually might, but this way, it wouldn’t be on Plaquette’s conscience.
She took a chair with her out into the alleyway, climbed up onto it, and unscrewed the George’s cap. She upturned it so that it sat like a bowl on the George’s empty head. From her apron she produced the bottle she’d taken from Ma’s kitchen; the one with the dregs of jake in it. Ma could never bear to throw anything away, even poison. Plaquette poured the remaining jake all over the receiver inside the George’s cap. There was a satisfying sizzling sound of wires burning out. Jake leg this, you son of a – well. Ma wouldn’t like her even thinking such language. She screwed the cap back onto the George’s head. Msieur might never discover the sabotage.
One more trip back inside the workroom, to Claude’s broom closet. On a hook in there hung the Pullman porter’s uniform that Msieur had been given to model the George’s painted costume after. It was a men’s small. A little large on her, but she belted in the waist and rolled up the trouser hems. She slid her hands into the trouser pockets, and exclaimed in delight. So much room! Not dainty, feminine pockets – bigger even than those stitched onto her workroom apron. She could carry almost anything she pleased in these!
But now she really must hurry. She strewed her clothing about the workroom – let Msieur make of that what he would. A kidnapping or worse, her virgin innocence soiled, maybe her lifeless body dumped in the bayou. And off they went – Plaquette striding freely in her masculine get-up, one foot in front of the other, making her plan as she made up the stories she told Pa: by letting the elements come to her in the moment. Claude rolled in her wake, tipping dangerously forward as he negotiated the steep drop from banquette to roadway, falling farther and farther behind.
When they came to the stairs up the side of the building where she lived she was stumped for what to do. Claude was not the climbing sort. For the moment she decided to store him in the necessary – she’d figure out how to get him back to Msieur’s later. She’d miss his cheerful face, though.
Ma yelped when a stranger in a porter’s uniform walked in the door. She reached for her rolling pin.
“Ma! It just me!” Plaquette pulled off her cap, let her hair bush out free from under it.
Ma boggled. “Plaquette? Why you all got up like that?”
The sound of Pa’s laughter rasped from her parents’ bedroom. Pa was sitting up in bed, peering through the doorway. “That’s my hellcat girl,” he said. “Mother, you ain’t got to go out on the Frisco run. Plaquette gon’ do it.”
Ma stamped her foot at him. “Don’t be a fool! She doing no such thing.”
Except she was! Till now, Plaquette hadn’t thought it through. But that’s exactly what she was going to do.
Ma could read the determination in her face. “Child, don’t you see? It won’t work. You too young to pass for your Pa. Gonna get him fired.”
Plaquette thought fast. “Not Pa. Pa’s replacement.” She pulled herself up to her full height. “Pleased to introduce you to Mule Aranslyde, namely myself. Ol’ Pullman’s newest employee.” She sketched a mock bow. Pa cackled in delight.
A little plate of peas and greens and ham fat had been set aside for her. Plaquette spooned it down while Ma went on about how Plaquette must have lost her everlovin’ mind and Pa wasn’t helping with his nonsense. Then Plaquette took a still protesting Ma by the hand and led her into the bedroom. “Time’s running short,” she said. “Lemme tell y’all why I need to go.” That brought a bit more commotion, though she didn’t even tell them the half of it. Just the bit about the George. And she maybe said she’d broken it by accident.
MA TWISTED PLAQUETTE’S long braids into a tight little bun and crammed them under the cap. “Don’t know how you gonna fake doin Pa’s job,” she fretted. “Ain’t as easy as it looks. I messed up so many times, supervisor asked me if I been in the whiskey. Nearly got your Pa fired.”
Plaquette took Ma’s two hands in her own. “I’m a ‘prentice, remember?” She patted the letter in her breast pocket that Pa had dictated to her, the one telling Pa’s porter friend Jonas Jones who she was and to look out for her and thank you God bless you. She kissed Pa goodbye. Ma walked her out onto the landing, and that’s when Plaquette’s plan began to go sideways. There at the foot of the stairs was Claude, backing up and ramming himself repeatedly into the bottom stair. Plaquette had forgotten she had Claude’s wardenclyffe in her pocket. All this time he’d been trying to follow it.
“Plaquette,” said Ma, “what for you steal Msieur’s machine?” It wasn’t a shout but a low, scared, angry murmur – far worse. In the lamplight scattered into the yard from the main street, Claude’s white-gloved hands glowed eerily.
Plaquette clattered down the stairs to confront the problem. “I know you think he yours, but girl, he don’t belong to you!” Ma had come down behind her. Plaquette didn’t even need to turn to know the way Ma was looking at her: hard as brass and twice as sharp.
“I – I set him to follow me.” Plaquette faltered for words. This was the part she hadn’t told them.
Ma only said, “Oh, Lord. We in for it now.”
Pa replied, “Maybe not.”
“WATCH WHERE YOU’RE going!”
Plaquette muttered an apology to the man she’d jostled. Even late like this – it must have been nearly midnight – New Orleans’ Union Station was thronged with travelers. But in Ma’s wake Plaquette and Claude made slow yet steady headway through the chattering crowds. A makeshift packing crate disguised her mechanical friend; Plaquette held a length of clothesline which was supposed to fool onlookers into thinking she hauled it along. Of course the line kept falling slack. Ma looked back over her shoulder for the thirteenth time since they’d left home. But it couldn’t be much farther now to the storage room where Pa had said they could hide Claude overnight. Or for a little longer. But soon as the inevitable hue and cry over his disappearance died down Plaquette could return him to Msieur’s. So long as no one discovered Claude where they were going to stash him –