The Metropolitans Read online

  “What is it?” Madge asked, afraid something had happened to one of her brothers.

  “Tony’s going to enlist tomorrow and he wants to get hitched first.”

  “Oh,” Madge said, wondering which of those two events had made Aunt Jean cry and what the right response would be. I’m sorry? Congratulations? Instead she said, “This is my friend Kiku. We’re, um, going to do some homework together.”

  “Sure, kid . . .” Aunt Jean began, turning toward Kiku, who was trying very hard to blend in with the wallpaper. Madge thought Aunt Jean would pop a gasket. Cause no trouble definitely didn’t include bringing home a Japanese girl the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. But Aunt Jean only blinked, rubbed her eyes as if she’d gotten a stray eyelash caught in one, and looked back at Madge. “It’s been a long day, Margaret, don’t fool with me.”

  Madge stared at her, not sure what she was mad at now. “But I wasn’t—”

  “Never mind,” Aunt Jean said, turning back to the mirror and pinching her cheeks to bring color to them. “There are sandwiches in the icebox and some cannoli Tony brought from the bakery. Clean up after yourself and for Pete’s sake, stay out of trouble!”

  * * *

  Kiku loved the Murphy bed. “Every morning I have to fold my futon. This would be so much easier.”

  They were sitting cross-legged on the pulled-down bed. They’d eaten all the sandwiches and cannoli, both girls surprised that they had any appetite at all, and then Madge suggested they wash and curl each other’s hair. “Who knows when we’ll have the chance again?”

  Kiku looked doubtfully at the rollers and bobby pins, but Madge coaxed her into trying it. They had washed their hair at the kitchen sink and then Madge, her own hair wrapped in a towel turban, sat behind Kiku, combing out her long silky hair. “Look,” Madge said, “there’s some of that gold paint from the book in your hair. You must have gotten it on you when you were kneeling next to your father.”

  “It looks pretty,” Kiku said, holding her hand up to the light. “I wonder if the boys have it stuck on them too.”

  Madge snorted. “Walt won’t be able to tell with all those freckles. I wonder how they’re getting along. They’re so different. Joe was awfully brave. . . .”

  “So was Walt,” Kiku said. “I’ve seen him at the museum before. He comes every Sunday and draws pictures of the knights. I think he’s lonely.”

  “Well, now he’s got Joe for company, and Joe will have something to eat.”

  Kiku laughed and then covered her mouth, looking embarrassed to be laughing with the world at war. “He did look half starved, but . . .” Her voice had grown somber again. “How long will Walt’s family let him stay there? And you certainly won’t be able to keep me here. What will happen if I go back to my apartment? Will those men come to take me away, too?”

  “We won’t let them,” Madge said, giving a firm yank with the brush. “You said your father thought Dr. Bean was an honorable man. He’ll help your father—and Joe and you. And in return, we’ll help the doc find that old book he lost.”

  “But didn’t you say that Dr. Bean didn’t want our help—that it was too dangerous?”

  “Pshaw,” Madge said. “Adults are always saying things like that. What could be dangerous about an old book?”

  “So you don’t believe it’s . . . magic?”

  Madge snorted. “If that book’s magic, I’m Joan Fontaine.” She put down the brush and picked up a magazine. “Here, let’s see if we can make me look like her.”

  * * *

  In Flatbush, Brooklyn, Walt’s aunt Sadie was pushing another helping of something she called gefilte fish on Joe. “A big, growing boy like you needs more meat on his bones,” she said, pinching Joe’s arm.

  “Ma,” Walt’s cousin Rachel said, “he’s gonna think you’re fattening him up for the pot if you keep poking him like he’s a Thanksgiving turkey.”

  “Yeah, Ma, leave the boy alone,” Walt’s cousin Ralph said. Ralph had made an unexpected appearance. He wasn’t supposed to come home from Harvard until next week, but when he heard the news, he got on the train from Boston because he wanted to join up with his friends from the neighborhood.

  “And throw away your scholarship to college!” Aunt Sadie had been crying, one hand pressed to her large bosom, when they’d walked in. “To risk your life? For what? You know how they’ll treat a Jewish boy in the army.”

  “You know how Hitler is treating our cousins in France?” Ralph had countered.

  They had all looked guiltily at Walt, and Walt explained to Joe that those cousins were his mother and father. Then Walt introduced Joe as a friend from school whose parents had been called to Washington for “war business.”

  “Nu, he’s skin and bones!” Walt’s aunt Sadie had cried, pushing Joe into a chair at the food-laden table. When Joe’s uncle began to say a prayer in an unfamiliar language, it meant nothing at first, but as he listened, he found the words about being thankful for the food became clear. How do I understand what it means? he wondered, but then he took a bite of a blintz and forgot everything but the delight of eating a fresh meal lovingly prepared. He’d never tasted food like this before—a noodle dish with raisins and sweet cheese, a kind of fish that didn’t look like it had ever swum, crisp blintzes covered with heavy cream they all called “sour” but that tasted fresh to Joe. The minute Joe finished one dish, Aunt Sadie gave him something else to eat, her eyes shining with happiness at every bite he took.

  After dinner, Ralph said he was going out to see some friends. He told Joe he was welcome to his bunk since he didn’t plan on getting back until late and he could camp out on the couch. “If I get back at all,” he’d added with a wink at Walt.

  “I bet he’s going to see his sweetheart,” Walt said later when they were in their bunks. “Probably all the girls will be going nuts over the guys who are enlisting.”

  “You sound jealous,” Joe said from the upper bunk.

  “I am!” Walt admitted. “I wish I was old enough to enlist! Don’t you?”

  Joe didn’t answer right away. He was thinking about how it had felt to hit the principal. He clenched his hands, remembering the impact of knuckles on flesh. It had felt good—and then it had felt bad. And the bad feeling had lasted longer than the good. He rubbed his hands and noticed there were still bits of the gold paint from the book on them. That was what the feeling of hitting the principal had been like, a stain that wouldn’t rub off. He wondered if that’s what it would feel like to kill a man, maybe many men, in war. How long would that bad feeling last? How hard would it be to get rid of that stain?

  Instead of saying all that to Walt, he asked a question. “Hey, what was that gefilte fish we ate, and where do you catch it?”

  Walt laughed. “Well, it’s not exactly a fish. . . .” Walt went on to explain the intricacies of Jewish home cooking with Joe interjecting questions—“What’s kosher?” “Why don’t you eat meat at the same meal as dairy?”—until he heard Walt snoring and realized he’d fallen asleep.

  It must be nice, Joe thought, to close your eyes at night and not see the face of the man you may have murdered.

  * * *

  When Joe finally did fall asleep, it wasn’t the principal’s face waiting for him. It was a grotesque iron mask carved to look like a snarling boar. Ivory tusks curled up from its fanged mouth. The worst part was the glimpse of flesh beneath the blackened metal—the red mouth, the strangely pale eyes. It looked like pieces of a man were trapped inside an iron cage. Even the voice that came out was hollow and booming, as if it came from the bottom of a well.

  “I’ve come to challenge your best knight,” it said, “to a contest unto death.”

  Joe stirred and felt the clash of metal on his own limbs. He knew he was the best knight, but it was not a welcome knowledge. Still, he would rise to the challenge, even though there was something
wrong about the knight. From behind him came a woman’s voice.

  “Don’t fight him.”

  “I may not refuse a challenge,” Joe heard himself saying. Only his voice was deeper, older. Everything about him was different. Except for one thing: he still carried the memory of striking a man and the knowledge that he would pay for it.

  “I will accept your challenge, knight!” he shouted. “May I know the name of him I fight against?”

  “You will know it at the moment of your death,” the knight replied. And then he sprang forward, faster than a man should be able to move in such heavy armor, swinging his sword in the air. Joe raised his own sword just in time to meet his opponent’s. The impact of metal on metal sent a shock through his limbs, but he fought on, meeting the knight blow for blow, all the time with those strange pale eyes locked on his, no matter which way he turned.

  Finally, he saw his chance, an opening in the knight’s armor just below the edge of his helmet. He swung his sword at it and cleaved the knight’s head from his body. The head rolled toward him and came to rest at his feet. He reached down and tore the helmet off. To his horror, the knight’s face came off with the helmet, blood and flesh clinging to the iron visor. But even more horrifying, when he looked back down, he saw another face behind the first, grinning up at him—

  Joe awoke, gasping in fright. Beneath him he heard Walt murmur, “Der Mann hat zwei Gesichter.”

  Exactly, Joe thought, too sleepy to wonder what Walt was dreaming—or how he’d understood the German for “the man has two faces.”

  8

  AT THE BOTTOM OF A TEAPOT

  KIKU WOKE UP in the unfamiliar apartment with a start. The first thing she remembered was why she wasn’t home with her father. The second was the awful dream she’d had about two knights fighting. One had worn silver armor and carried a shield with three diagonal stripes on it. The other wore a helmet with a grinning boar’s face carved on it. She’d known that there was something wrong with the boar’s head knight. She’d begged the knight in silver not to fight him, but he had anyway (He never listens, she’d thought in the dream, as if she knew him), and when he had at last defeated the other knight, severed his head, and removed his visor, she’d been horrified to see that there was another face behind the first one.

  Ugh! She threw the blankets off as if worms might be crawling on the sheets.

  Madge moaned and sat up, curler papers sticking up all around her head. “Where’s the fire?” she complained, rubbing her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Kiku said. “I had a terrible dream.”

  “You too?” Madge asked, getting up and shuffling over to the icebox. “Must have been the liverwurst. . . . Hey, there aren’t any new sandwiches. I wonder if Aunt Jean came back.”

  While Madge went to check her aunt’s room, Kiku got up. She took the curlers out of her hair and saw that it was as straight as ever. She wasn’t surprised, but she was a little disappointed. She felt different, as if there was something fizzing through her blood. But when she peered at herself in the bathroom mirror, she looked just the same: straight black hair, bangs that were getting a little too long because her mother wasn’t around to trim them, plain brown eyes. Her same ordinary face, only after yesterday, it was a face that everyone would stare at. The face of the enemy.

  “What did you expect?” she asked the reflection in the mirror. “That you were going to wake up someone different?” She had been someone different in the dream.

  But that was just a dream.

  She rinsed her mouth with tooth powder, washed her face, and dressed. When she came out, Madge was pouring bitter-smelling coffee into two mugs that said SUNNYSIDE DINER on them. Oatmeal was bubbling on the stove.

  “Aunt Jean didn’t come home last night, so I figured, what the heck, I’d cook us some breakfast. I hope coffee’s all right. We’re out of tea.”

  Madge was talking fast, moving around the tiny kitchen, avoiding Kiku’s eyes. Maybe she’s sorry she invited me to stay, Kiku thought. Trying to keep out of the way, she went over to make the bed, but Madge came over and pushed the bed up against the wall, jamming all the sheets and blankets in higgledy-piggledy.

  “What difference does it make?” she asked. “There’s no one here to care.”

  * * *

  The museum didn’t open until ten, but Kiku had the key to the staff entrance. “My father always let me carry it,” she told Madge. “He said it was to teach me responsibility, but now I wonder if he worried that he might be taken and I would need it.”

  The staff entrance was in the basement. She led Madge through a maze of corridors, and Madge stopped to peer in the little glass windows in each door even though they were all dark.

  “Jeez Louise, this place is as big downstairs as it is upstairs. What’s in all these rooms?”

  “Mostly storage for holdings that aren’t on display. The museum owns far more than it can exhibit at one time. There are workrooms and offices, too, for different curators, but no one seems to be in yet. I suppose everyone’s still stunned at the war news. I hope Dr. Bean is in.”

  When she opened the door to the last corridor, she saw that the door to the Arms and Armor workroom was wide open.

  “Oh good,” Madge said, going on ahead. “Dr. Bean must be here.”

  Kiku stood in the hall, halted by a feeling that something was wrong. Dr. Bean never left his door wide open like that.

  A cry from Madge made her run down the hall, where she found her standing in the middle of an utterly transformed workroom. The table and chairs lay on the floor with their legs up in the air like a bunch of dead sheep. Tapestries had been torn from the wall. The armor was piled in heaps—breastplates, greaves, gauntlets, and visors strewn around the room like body parts from some horrible massacre. Pages from the drowned book and what looked like pieces of today’s New York Times floated over it all like ashes over a bonfire. Kiku knelt to pick up one of the pages and found that it wasn’t paper—it was a silk scarf. A white silk scarf with the monogram VdL stitched in blue.

  “It’s Miss Lake’s,” Kiku said.

  “Holy smokes!” a voice declared from the doorway. “What happened here?”

  Kiku looked to the doorway and saw Walt and Joe. “The real question,” she said, holding up the scarf so they could all see the spot of blood on it, “is what happened to Dr. Bean and Miss Lake!”

  * * *

  “Quick!” Madge said. “Get in here and close the door.”

  “I think it’s a little late to close the door,” Walt pointed out, following Madge’s directions nonetheless. He was looking sadly at the piles of armor that yesterday had been arrayed so neatly along the shelves. “Who would do this?” he asked.

  “Mr. January, of course,” Madge said. “He must’ve come back looking for something.”

  “But what?” Walt asked.

  “The message that was taken from the spy,” Joe said. “If Mr. January found out his spy was dead, he’d want to get his message back before anyone could decode it and find out about the sabotage plot.”

  “How would he know Dr. Bean had it?” Kiku asked. She had begun sorting through the chaos of broken armor. Miss Lake always kept it all neat and polished. She would be devastated to see it like this—but then she thought of the spot of blood on Miss Lake’s scarf and was afraid that Miss Lake might never see the workroom again. I won’t let that happen, a voice inside her head said. She shook her head to clear away the unfamiliar voice and focused on what Joe was saying as he knelt to help her.

  “Maybe someone at the museum overheard us talking yesterday.”

  “Or in the taxi,” Madge suggested. “Here—let’s get the table righted and these shelves up.”

  “Wait,” Walt said. “Shouldn’t we be calling the police before touching any of this?”

  “And tell them what?” Joe asked. “That a man in a t
rench coat, who we saw disappear in a fog, broke in here to find a message from a Nazi spy that’s been encoded using a magical book?”

  “They’d never believe us,” Kiku said. “And they’d arrest me.”

  “And me,” Joe said, helping Walt to flip over his end of the table. “But if you two”—he nodded to Madge and Walt—“want to go to the police, then you should do what you think is right. Just give me a chance to clear off.”

  “Yes,” Kiku said. “I, too, would like time to . . . clear off.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Madge cried. “No one’s clearing off. We’re in this business together, right?”

  “Yes, but . . .” Walt turned so white, his freckles stood out like spots of blood. “If we don’t tell the police, who’s going to stop the attack on New York?”

  The four of them stood staring at one another across the chaos of scattered armor. For a moment, Kiku had an idea she’d stood like this before, looking at her friends across a battlefield strewn with weapons and pieces of armor . . . and the bodies of the dead and dying. She shuddered at the image.

  “We are,” Madge said. “We’re going to stop the attack on New York.”

  “But how?” Kiku demanded. “We don’t have the message. We don’t have anything.” She bit her lip to keep from crying, but Madge must have seen the tears in her eyes, because she pulled a handkerchief out of her coat pocket. As she passed it to Kiku, something fell out of it—a piece of paper folded into the shape of a bird. It fluttered toward the floor. As she watched it fall, Kiku remembered the paper airplanes they’d seen yesterday and the messages written on them.

  “Hey,” Madge said, reaching for the paper bird.

  But Kiku had already caught it. “It’s an origami crane,” she said. “I taught Miss Lake how to make them. I think it has writing on it.”

  “Open it up,” Walt said.

  Kiku unfolded the crane with trembling fingers.

  “It’s the spy’s message!” Walt cried. “She gave it to you, Madge!”