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M y cooking day had arrived. Thankfully, there was enough in our pantry to make a large vat of cinnamon-spiced maicena —the cheap, easy way to warm up a creaky boricua in winter.

Everyone ate and went about their morning discussions like I’d been in the rotation all along, sweeping in and out of the kitchen for plates and saltshakers, me holding the stool while Madam Navya climbed up to reach the cupboards. Even Emmett forgot to leave a nasty editorial on my cooking before heading out with Eli to “chase seagulls on the beach,” whatever that meant.

Maybe that’s what Morgan took for being “useless on the offseason,” because Lulu sent them off with an overflowing picnic basket like they wouldn’t come back until April.

I was washing dishes when Igor ducked into the kitchen to start a fresh pot of café . As la cafetera began to heat, he folded his long torso over the counter to inspect the pot I’d set out.

“Mr. Benny, this fish in water—is on purpose?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, it’s gotta soak to get soft.”

“Why not get fish fresh? More trouble, this seems...”

“ Guisado needs salt cod, actually,” I explained. “Don’t worry, it flavors the sauce.”

“ Sauce ,” Igor hummed. “Very fond of sauces, I am. My wife make most beautiful borscht, you know.”

My washcloth paused over the plate. “Wife?”

“Ekaterina. Moy tyul’pan. My tulip.”

A woman eight feet tall—with skirts that began at my shoulders the way Igor’s trousers did—thundered into my imagination. “Where is she?”

The way the giant’s eyes bore into that pot of soaking fish told me we’d stumbled onto a subject he didn’t often discuss. He cleared his throat and refocused his gaze slightly closer to my face. “Is gone.”

Caramba. My mouth was getting too careless in these new surroundings. “I’m real sorry.”

“No, no. Is my fault,” he sighed somberly. “I leave Moscow during Great Famine, you know. I make promise to go to America, and I say to her, when I have house and job for us, she will follow.”

He pulled out a stool and dropped down onto it. It looked like a matchbox under him.

“On foot, I walk to Sankt-Petersburg , and I sail to America. I find apartment, get job in shoe factory—but it take so much time, you know?” he said, as if to himself. “It take almost three years before I can send letter for Ekaterina to come.” As he spoke, he dug a folded-up paper out of his vest pocket, torn at the edges, and browned from handling. He held it out to me.

Inside was a crinkled photograph of Igor standing larger than life beside a woman who stood level, not with his shoulders, but with his waist, her light hair braided under una corona of flowers. I squinted at the handwritten letter wrapped around it. “I can’t read Russian.”

“Ekaterina die of cholera, it say.”

My ears tensed around that word. It sounded the same in every language, and it wasn’t until I came to Nueva York and heard it repeated in the multilingual mutterings of other immigrants on the waterfront that I realized why. A deadly contagion that raged across the globe like fire didn’t have time to change its name.

“That don’t sound like your fault, Igor,” I said quietly.

I gave him back his mementos, and he returned them to his pocket. “Maybe. Madam Navya tell me is no help to look back with regret,” he admitted with a shrug. “But I miss Ekaterina. Before I join Menagerie, she was only person in the world who look at me and see Igor Rybakov.”

How could anyone not see Igor Rybakov? You could pick him out of a crowd from the top of the MetLife Tower. “I don’t think I know what you mean.”

He lurched to his feet, took la cafetera off the stove, and lumbered back toward the hallway, pausing to smile wistfully at me before ducking under the rise.

“To Ekaterina, I was devoted husband,” he said. “Not giant.”

Now that the merman and I had made Timmy-sized steps towards civility, I was looking forward to peeking behind the Menagerie curtain, but a note from Morgan stopped me at the ticket podium. It listed all the renovation supplies he wanted me to purchase, along with his written permission to pay for any materials I’d need for the pump as long as I could account for everything I’d bought. An envelope of cash was waiting at the gate with Oscar Barnes for my use.

Checking on Río would have to wait until dark.

Morgan’s directions led me to the stables behind the theater where a pushcart sat next to a wooden basin and steel cask on wheels, no doubt abandoned there whenever he’d topped off the tank. I rolled the pushcart through the rear auxiliary exit of Luna Park toward Eighth and Surf where a friendly voice called out, “Benny!”

Matthias was striding toward me, an easy smile raising his round cheeks high enough to lift the glasses right off his nose. He had a pencil tucked behind his ear, and his large hand all but eclipsed the small notebook in his grip.

“You following me?” I called back.

His laughter pulled his coat seams taut. “For your information, I am absorbing the setting of my memoir and taking notes. Just so happens you’re part of the scenery.” He snatched Morgan’s shopping list out of the pushcart and examined it. “Looks like I showed up right on time too. Ain’t no way you gonna tow all them buckets of paint without snapping your arms off at the elbow.”

“I ain’t weak,” I said defensively. “I hammer iron.”

“ Hammered iron. Past tense. And like hell you ain’t. I’ve lifted potato sacks heavier than you.”

I snatched back the list. “Just tell me where a smithy can buy a furnace around here, will ya?”

We headed east toward the residential part of town where Matthias promised we’d find a general store to suit my needs. He played tour guide while we walked the main drag, and I swear, every block that wasn’t already cluttered with carnival rides played host to a hotel or inn, sometimes both. A person could probably come to Coney Island every day for a year and sleep in a different bed each night.

And suddenly, there it was. Not that anyone with eyes could miss it. Its shadow ate up the whole street.

Dreamland Park.

Por Dios , the gang was right to be nervous about this place. An archway bigger, grander, and whiter than Luna Park’s sloped over our heads, held aloft by a giant plaster angel that stood like a winged effigy to Venus between a pair of knock-off Italian frescoes.

Over the angel’s head, white light bulbs spelled out the word “CREATION.”

“She’s... naked.”

“Yeah?” Matthias sniffed. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“But, how’s that... allowed ?”

His glasses magnified the tired contempt in his eyes. “Reynolds is smart, that’s how. He sold the Creation ride as a scenic railway attraction about the Book of Genesis. And just like that, all the Roman Catholics on the oversight commission were fine with a two-story-tall tomato with her bare breasts hanging out on Surf Avenue like fishing tack— Oh, hey, how’s it goin’, Georgie?”

A young guy with an upturned nose and boxy shoulders hunched up to his ears was rolling up to Dreamland’s gates with his own pushcart, this one loaded with barrels of tar. “Hiya, Matty,” he said in an oily voice. “Business goin’ so bad across the street, you had to come snoop on our doorstep?”

“Not remotely,” said Matthias with a relaxed grin. “I was just introducing our new hire here to Luna Park’s illegitimate offspring.”

All the smug dripped off Georgie’s mug. “We’ll see who’s legiti-mate at the end of the summer season,” he sneered and gave the pushcart a shove. “Give my regards to that sweet li’l contortionist o’ yours, will ya?”

“Aw, I would, but Sonia told me to tell you she’s fresh outta room for regards. See ya, Georgie.” Then, Matthias leaned down, muttered “Dreamland’s slimy gatekeeper” into my ear, and led me out of the angel’s long shadow.

I glanced back over my shoulder at Creation . As unseasoned as I was in the art of luring pleasure-seekers, I didn’t think a gaudy plaster monument invited any profound ruminations on God. And I’d read the Book of Genesis a dozen times. Aloud.

Río, on the other hand. The sight of him ripped up everything I thought I understood about creation. One look at him and you had to wonder if the Bible had been selling God short this whole time.

“Is that all the merman’s supposed to compete with?” I asked.

“Nope. Creation ’s a tiny slice of a much bigger cake. In Morgan’s mind, it’s his merman exhibit versus the whole of Dreamland.” Matthias rolled his shoulders, quickened his step, and muttered, “and hopefully, he ain’t bettin’ our necks to win.”

I rushed with the pushcart to keep up. “What’s that mean?”

“Nothin’.”

“You’re the one who brought up our necks. I’m kind of attached to mine.”

His gaze shifted around, scoping for nearby eyes and ears. “Here’s the thing,” he said in a lower voice. “Since ’04, Luna’s been fighting a losing war to keep up with Dreamland, right? Ain’t no way the Menagerie would’ve lasted this long unless some charitable donations of the criminal variety were in the mix.”

I gawped. “ Criminal? ”

“Jesus, keep your voice down,” he hissed. “Yes, criminal. Take you, for instance. Luna’s dying a slow death, yet somehow Morgan found the clams to pay for a tank, theater renovations, and your labor ?” he said, ticking the items off his fingers. “‘Patrons,’ he calls them, but it don’t take a genius to figure out he and Sonia been spending the offseason cutting deals with folks too shady to show their faces in Manhattan Beach.”

“What’s Sonia got to do with it?”

He raised an eyebrow. “The man don’t go anywhere without her. I got my suspicions why—and none of ’em look good.”

It didn’t take a second to run those calculations; Sonia’s flimsy handshake masked a hidden strength for maneuvering folks any way she wished. She probably could have convinced half the Ironworks to show up with their own paintbrushes and pitch at Fulton Ferry station if she’d wanted.

“You think Morgan’s in trouble then?”

Matthias sighed like he’d already run that question into the ground. “I dunno. That man’s brain train only runs in one direction. Don’t leave much room for considering consequences once he’s fixed himself on something he wants.”

I frowned. “Consequences like... the mermaid?”

He scoffed in my face. “You think killing a mermaid keeps Sam up at night? Anyone tell you what got him so bent on hunting mermaids in the first place?”

I shook my head.

“The way Saul told it, Sam Dixon was just a kid when his rich pop took him out on the ocean for a ride on the family sailboat. While they’re out there, a storm sweeps in and, BAP ”—Matthias clapped his hands—“he gets knocked overboard. As he’s sinking, he notices he ain’t the only thing in the water trying not to make like a stone. When his pop pulls him out, he gets a better look. There and gone in the flip of a fin is a real live mermaid. And well, you can guess what happened after that.”

“No, what?”

He lowered his voice further like the plaster angel might be a spy for Reynolds. “He lost his goldang mind, that’s what. Gabbin’ to anybody with ears about fish ladies out to kill us or, at the very least, watch us drown. When no one believed him, he started wasting his father’s dough on pricy voyages to see if he could catch one—until his folks cut off his inheritance and tossed him out.”

“Caramba.”

“Yep,” Matthias said. “That’s when Jack-the-original-Morgan found him. Brought Sam into the fold as an outside talker, seeing as Sam’s tongue was nice and polished from sucking on that silver spoon so long.”

The cart rolled over a stone that nearly tripped me up as much as Matthias’s English. “What’s an ‘outside talker’?”

“Oh, you know. The straight-lacer who sells the show on the promenade and gets the crowds through the front door. Sam’s probably the best one there is,” he explained matter-of-factly. “Problem was, he never really got in with the rest of us odd types. Lulu thinks he was holding onto his old family too hard to take up with a new one. I think he thinks he’s too good for a crew like ours.

“Either way, he kept himself outside our world just like his work stayed outside the tents—until Jack choked on a chicken bone, and Sam inherited the operation along with the Morgan name. That was the very moment Sam’s crusade to redeem his trashed reputation turned into Coney Island’s most successful sideshow.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I remarked.

“It ain’t bad. But lemme teach you a thing about showbiz, Benny.”

He laid a thick hand on my shoulder. “Inside every showman is two people—the one on the poster and the one you leave offstage. Poster Sam can charm the pants off the governor. But Offstage Sam is ruthless. Chases what he wants like a hound on the hunt.

“Now, you can rely on an ambitious man to do ambitious things. But an ambitious man with a grudge has got a powder keg in his pocket,” he went on sagely. “Sam’s been stewing over the mermaid that made a fool of him since he was a kid, and something about this war with Dreamland picks at that old scab—makes him believe he’s got something to prove all over again. And now that he’s got the honest-to-God mythological beast locked up in his theater, I’ve got a hunch we’re gonna see a lot more of Offstage Sam.”

My uneasiness must have been plastered across my face because Matthias stopped walking to look at me.

“Listen,” he said. “The pay’s good. The company is even better. And for all his flaws, Sam’s the reason the Menagerie is still the best sideshow in Coney Island. Just keep your eyeballs open and stay out of Sam’s business, same as I do, and you won’t get kicked back to the curb all because you accidentally lit the powder keg.”

“All right. I will,” I said as we started walking again. “But can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“How’d he know that mermaid was gonna drown him?” Specifically, I thought of Río, pulling Sonia’s boat to shore instead of dragging her down to join the victims of the General Slocum disaster.

Matthias puffed a short laugh. “Great question. Now, I’ll ask you one. You ever heard of a person who can see underwater?”

“Uh... no?”

“Exactly,” he said. “My guess? Sam just assumed it was out to get him. Which oughta tell you something about how that man sees the world.”