My hand slides around the grip even as my finger hugs the trigger.
“Finally find one?” Roosevelt asks.
From the ceiling, I pull out a polished .380-caliber pistol. No serial numbers. No question, illegal. Cain grabbed a book. My father grabbed a trophy. I need something for myself.
It’s hardly a perk of my job, but it’s the same in every crap neighborhood in America: Show me the local fast-food joint, and I’ll show you where the kids are hiding their guns.
I tuck the pistol in the back of my waistband, then zip my jacket and dive back into East Cleveland’s ferocious cold. It’s a two-minute walk back to our motel—a two-story dump that doesn’t even have a name, just a sign out front that’s painted red, white, blue, green, black, and more red. U.S. and Palestinian colors, with the word Vacancy along the bottom.
“You got the supermarket stuff?” Roosevelt asks.
In my jacket pocket, I feel for the vinegar and fabric softener. “All set,” I tell him.
“So you’re gonna do the rest by yourself, yes?”
I circle up the outdoor stairs and follow the signs for room 216.
“Cal, please tell me you’re doing the rest by yourself,” Roosevelt pleads.
“Listen, I should run,” I say, stopping at the door.
“You’re not even listening, are you? Dammit, yo momma’s so fat—”
“Don’t start,” I warn as I twist my key and use my shoulder to shove open the motel door.
“Didja get it?” Serena calls out, leaping my way.
“Cal, you’re a big boy,” Roosevelt warns in my ear. “You do what you want. But please: I know what happened at the Siegel house, but don’t feel the need to protect her just because she protected you.”
I slap the phone shut.
Serena’s already holding my hand, dragging me inside. I take my jacket off slowly. They know about the supermarket. They don’t need to know about the gun.
“You get it or not?” my father calls out from the narrow bed. He’s no longer holding his side. The bleeding’s stopped.
“Of course I got it,” I say as I toss my two supermarket purchases onto the empty bed. My dad knows it from his painting days. Vinegar and fabric softener. The best way to unstick wallpaper glue.
From my backpack, I take out the swatch of wallpaper we found in Jerry Siegel’s old bedroom. Four panels glued on top of one another. Ellis called it the rest of a map. Looks like torn-up pages from an old comic book to me. But whatever Jerry Siegel hid by gluing them together, it’s time to finally peel it apart.
57
August 3, 1900
Brussels, Belgium
Mikhel Segalovich was vomiting. It was coming fast now, a hefty heave that emptied his stomach of the stale bread he’d fished from the trash. From his lips, strands of drool twirled in the wind, dangling down to the cobblestone of the narrow alley, but even as he wiped it away, he never once let go of the leather hold-all at his side.
It’d been nearly four months since he left his hometown in Lithuania. Four months without his wife. His parents. His children—two daughters. He knew bad times were ahead when he was drafted into the Russian army. It was always bad for Jews in the army, which was why so many tried to bribe their way out. Mikhel’s father had tried the same—selling his gold, his wife’s rings, even the family Bible. For all Lithuanians, there was mandatory army service for at least five years. But the Jews were taken for ten, twenty, sometimes as long as twenty-five years. Mikhel’s father begged and pleaded to keep his boy safe. But the Segalovichs were poor. And the poor went into the army.
In the beginning, Mikhel committed himself to hard work. Maybe he’d make cavalry or even sergeant. But he learned quickly. A Jewish sergeant giving orders to Russians? Never. Even in the cavalry—they weren’t giving sabers and pistols to a poor uneducated Jew. No, the Jews were beaten and practiced on. Low infantrymen to sweep stables and live in feces. That’s all Mikhel would ever be.
Until Sweden.
Back then, they called the trips scientific expeditions. It was how the Russians discovered the Bering Strait, as well as the mammoth fossils in Siberia. Mikhel heard the rumors . . . the search for an imperial treasure . . . the ancient carving known as the Book of God. But when Mikhel heard that he was chosen, that he and a dozen other Jews from different units were being allowed to leave the Russian Empire for this expedition, he knew what his group really was. A suicide squad.
They didn’t expect the group to survive. Didn’t expect them, in that winter, to even make it to Sweden. Most of them didn’t. But the youngest, Mikhel, did.
He wasn’t a hero. Indeed, he was simply the kid in charge of the horses and dogs. So when they finally found the cave—the makeshift tomb left behind by the monks—Mikhel was told to keep watch outside.
He did his job. He stood, in his unlined Russian riding boots, knee-deep in the snow. He waited in the icy silence, wondering what was happening inside. And then Mikhel heard the screams.
“Hopen problemen, eh?” a Belgian teenager teased, laughing as he ran past Mikhel vomiting in the alleyway. “Heaps of problems, eh?”
Ignoring the child, Mikhel spat violently at the ground, clearing the last bits of vomit from his lips. Tucked between two modern houses, he knew this wasn’t a perfect hiding spot, but it was the one with the best view of Avenue Louise.
Still clutching the handle of his leather hold-all, Mikhel studied each and every lime and sycamore tree that lined the main avenue. He eyed the two motorcars rumbling through the square. He even checked the windows of the blue-grained stone house across the street. He knew he had been followed. They had to be close. So from here on in, for Mikhel, it was simply a question of timing.
According to the pocketwatch they gave him, it was exactly half-past ten in the morning. He didn’t hear the warning sounds, but if he wanted to pull this off . . . no question, he had to have some faith.
Bursting from the alleyway, he darted straight toward the pushcarts and milk wagons that filled the square. Sure enough, the kling-ting of the electric tram tickled the air. On his right, the tram’s bright red carriage hummed and stuttered along the tracks that ran up Avenue Louise. Just as they had promised.
At this hour, the passengers were few. The suspicious would have no place to hide. Cutting behind a fruit wagon with a large striped umbrella, Mikhel, for the fourth time, checked over his shoulder. All clear.
“Huelp nodij met uw kossers?” a porter in a crisp linen smock asked as the tram pulled up to the platform. “Help with your luggage?”
Mikhel shook his head, refusing eye contact. No. He hadn’t brought it this far to let the hold-all out of sight.
He took a final scan of the platform. Except for the porter, he was the only one there. He still waited until the last minute to hop aboard.
“Welkom, meneer. Eerste of tweede klas?” asked a ticket collector with a thick mustache.
Mikhel didn’t understand.
“Eerste of tweede klas?” the collector repeated again, this time motioning to the back of the tram, which was divided into two sections. One with cushions. One without. “First or second class?”
Mikhel had spent his whole life knowing the answer to that one. “Second class,” he whispered, handing over threepence.
The change was a halfpenny, and the collector paused a moment, hoping that Mikhel would let him keep it.
Mikhel opened his palm. The collector shot him a look. Mikhel didn’t care. To get from Sweden to here . . . He had nothing left. Nothing but the items in the hold-all.