Page 8

B eing a superstitious lady in life, Tití Luz would have either enthusiastically endorsed this impromptu trip, or else told me to pray for San Miguel’s protection from whatever evil influence had lured me out of Red Hook. Either way, I was on the brT from Knickerbocker station bound for the Devil’s Playground with an emergency wardrobe, my cuatro, and a duffel of my rescued belongings on my back.

The trip was long enough for a light nap, but when my eyes creaked back open an hour later, nearly every passenger had migrated to the righthand windows where the sun poured in, and a strange skyline grew larger in the distance. I crushed my nose against the glass for a better look.

Sloping roller coasters cut into the horizon like small mountains alongside a scattering of Ferris wheels, bathhouses, and white, gilded towers. They stood against the beachfront like monuments to American pleasure-seeking as we approached, but the effect seemed less impressive once I took in the view behind it: the Atlantic Ocean.

Maybe Innis was right about getting out of the factory.

The Culver Depot for Brooklyn Rapid Transit sat at Surf Avenue and West Fifth Street beside gigantic billboards for Cloverleaf Salmon and the Galveston Flood . The latter depicted a natural disaster of San Ciriaco proportions, except a large outdoor venue had been illustrated around it filled with a horde of smiling gentry. Not an actual flood, then; it was a show .

I shook my head. “Yanquis.”

Wandering off the unloading platform, a flutter of streamers down the block caught my eye. I quickened my pace toward a guy who looked like he knew the place.

“Pardon, sir, is that Luna Park?”

The man tracked my finger behind him to a tall white archway where a wooden roller coaster peeked out from between the pillars. “Nah,” he said. “This here’s Steeplechase. Don’t you recognize the Funny Face?”

He walked off before I could press him for directions, distracted as I was by the clownish mask mounted to the wall with droopy eyes, red lips, and too many teeth for a human mouth. I wouldn’t have called it funny; over sun-bleached gates shuttered to an empty street, it made Steeplechase Park look like a ruin from a lost civilization.

Was Luna Park shuttered too? What if Samuel Morgan wasn’t even there?

I was beginning to wish I’d held onto Mr. Morgan’s batty help-wanted ad when a flyer tumbled in on an ocean breeze and attached itself to my trousers. I peeled it off my leg.

“Morgan’s Menagerie of Human Oddities.” The address was displayed conveniently on the back, too.

Barco que no anda no llega a puerto.

I followed Surf Avenue farther east and finally came upon the gilded entrance I was looking for. Between two enormous rainbow spires lined with enough electric bulbs to light a small city was “Luna Park” spelled in yet more light bulbs. A large red heart bore the words “The Heart of Coney Island” below it, sending a pleasant shiver of excitement through me.

This place had to shine like the sun on a summer evening.

“Hello?” I took out my old key ring and banged it on the iron post. “Anybody here?”

I kept it up until a portly fellow in painter’s coveralls with a mousey bigote on his upper lip jogged out of a bend in the promenade with New York–brand exasperation. “Aw-right, aw-right, I’m comin’. Jeez, whatsamattawitchoo?”

This guy’s Brooklyn accent was thick enough to insulate a house. I couldn’t wait to try it out later.

“Sorry, I was hoping you could help me find someone.” I passed him the flyer. “Do you know Samuel Morgan?”

The overalls man thumbed at his runny nose with a hankie. “Who’s askin’?”

“Benny.” I held out my mended meat hook. “Benny Caldera.”

“Caldera, Caldera,” he murmured as he shook it. “Lemme guess, that’s Portuguese?”

“Porto Rican, actually.”

“Yeah, ’course, that’s what I meant.” He felt around his coveralls, then pulled out keys to unlock the gate. “I’m Oscar Barnes, the distinguished gatekeeper they don’t pay enough to keep around on the offseason. Sam expecting you?”

“Uh, not exactly. I built him, uh—an asset and decided to come check on it.”

“An asset , says you! I tell ya, that guy’s always movin’ dough around,” he remarked as the gate swung open. “All righty, Mr. Caldera. Follow me.”

I waited for him to mention it, the creature Morgan had brought in during the night. Then again, maybe this guy had made the same agreement with the showman that I had, another crisp banknote exchanged for silence in Oscar’s pocket. But a sidelong glance at Oscar’s tepid expression changed my mind. This guy clearly had no idea Morgan had a tank, much less a merman.

Oscar led me through a wide vein of boardwalk lined with empty storefronts and hibernating attractions. On the way, we passed a drained lake, a building-sized slide, and other mechanical wonders that towered overhead with goofy names like “The Teaser,” “The Tickler,” and “Whirl the Whirl.” The smithy in me recognized a patchwork of influences in the architecture—European, Oriental, Ancient Roman—with swag molding and acanthus scrolls all over the place looking like someone had slicked plaster over flowers at the height of their bloom.

“First time here, eh?” asked Oscar when he caught me with my head on a swivel.

“Yeah,” I said breathlessly.

He dug a cigar and matchbook out of his coveralls. “I can tell you ain’t seen Dreamland yet by that moony look on your face. Good thing too if you’re here to see Sam.”

“Why’s that?”

Oscar stopped walking. “Gee whiz, kid. Ain’t you heard of the Amusement War?”

I shook my head.

He hooted like I’d just made all this extra walking worth his trouble. “Well, lemme educate you on account of Sam Morgan being real keen to win it,” he said, wiping his nose on a paint-splattered sleeve before it could run onto his mustache.

“Obviously, George Tilyou’s baby came first—Steeplechase Park—and everyone went wild for it. But then came Thompson and Dundy with plans for a bigger park the likes o’ nothin’ nobody ain’t never seen before. And boy did they deliver,” he said proudly. “Luna Park was the biggest, prettiest thirty-nine acres of Brooklyn seaside amusement, and for a whole year after they built it, nothing on Surf Avenue could top our attractions—or our crowds.”

He lit up his stogie. I held my face away from it. “But then ,” Oscar continued dramatically, “in comes William H. Reynolds with Dreamland . Now, it’d be one thing if he did something different. Made something new. But nah, that louse just took everything we got here and made it more . We got a tower? He built two. He found out we got a midget in the sideshow, so he bought himself a whole midget city. More thrills, more chills, more dollar bills, know what I mean?”

Oscar picked a new key off the ring and stopped in front of a green awning that read “Morgan’s Menagerie of Human Oddities” in the same bold letters I’d seen on the coach last night.

“Do me a favor. When you see Sam,” he said, adjusting his cap, “make sure you’re still wearin’ that doofy smile. He’ll be pleased as punch to see someone fawning over Luna Park again.”

I let out a short laugh as he unlocked the door. “That shouldn’t be too hard. Thanks.”

Oscar directed me inside where a mildew-scented draft met me at the entrance. Then he closed the door and shut the daylight out, leaving me in the dark. I reached for San Cristóbal.

“Mr. Morgan?”

My eyes were adjusting. A few steps into a room as chilly and dimly lit as my tenement at night, I felt my arm brush against something cold, turned to look, then practically leapt out of my union suit.

A dilapidated, sour-smelling creature with clubbed, taxidermic limbs sat on a table display next to me. Under it, the word “Chimera” was printed on a small panel in a distinguished-looking font. When I backed away from it, I nearly landed in the balding lap of a yeti.

This was a whole room of weird monstruos . I pulled myself together and kept walking past more beasts of horror and fancy, each christened with some mythological name or other. Not that I thought the Menagerie was going for authenticity, what with the Hydra’s mismatched heads being obviously stitched onto a salvaged alligator skin steamer trunk.

Caramba. Luna Park patrons were suckers.

A stripe of light under a set of double doors lured me out of the creature room and into a slim hallway. The path was lit by a series of small electric lamps, each hung over a large painted particle board of “fantastic freaks.” Weirder than the freaks themselves was the realization that I recognized some of them.

Matthias’s was first. “Mighty” wasn’t the word that came to mind as I examined this painted jungle-man depiction in which he wore nothing but an animal print leotard that bared his thick, tattooed chest, arms, and legs. Sure enough, stretched over the dumbbells he held aloft were the words “Watch Him Lift 2,000 Pounds!”

Beside that poster was the Flexible Fraülein’s. I paused to gape at Sonia’s likeness, balanced on one leg in a skimpy yellow costume with ruffled sleeves, her other leg draped unnaturally over her shoulder as if it had broken off the hinge of her hip.

Every poster left more clues about Morgan’s odd crew as I went. Next was Madam Navya, the “smallest woman in the world,” followed by Eli and Emmett, whose illustration addressed all my questions about what made two brothers with a missing leg between them qualify as curiosities. The answer, I now understood: they performed not merely as twins, but as conjoined twins!

There were posters for people I hadn’t met yet too. The Menagerie included a fire-breathing phoenix, a twelve-foot-tall giant, and a woman so fat “It Takes Seven Men to Hug Her!” My excitement whittled into discomfort at the ruses the posters advertised.

If Eli and Emmett’s act was fake, were they all embusteros ? Matthias’s words revisited my thoughts.

Do you believe I can lift two thousand pounds?

At the end of the hall, an electric lamp hung with nothing beneath it but the ghost of an outline where a painting had once been. I pulled my coat tighter around me, feeling like that Oscar guy had stranded me in a haunted house.

The hallway led to a theater. Two electric chandeliers glowed warm over a large room striped with benches facing a red--curtained proscenium stage, the round apron of which was accessible by a set of steps built into one side and a ramp built into the other. Red, green, and yellow bunting hung over plaster friezes depicting gods and beasts I knew from Homero’s stories.

“Zeus, Atena, cíclope,” I whispered, “Pegaso, Poseidón...”

A burble of water from behind the curtain cut me off mid--pantheon.

Now, a smarter person would’ve turned around and taken the straightest path out of Luna Park toward the brT—chalked the whole thing up to a New York snipe hunt that Tití Luz would have thumped me for if she were still alive.

Shame I wasn’t smart. I took one last glance around to make sure I was alone and snuck closer to the stage, toward a sliver of blue light shining through the gap in the crushed red velvet. I fit my hand in it and with a deep breath, stepped through.

There it was in the center of the stage, propped on a wooden and steel platform just like it had been in the sketch, but with the springs and wheels stripped and the water filled to the top. Someone must have cleaned it because the grass and silt were gone. Near the ceiling, a hopper window let in daylight, which reflected fluid patterns off the water that danced on the walls like the whole stage had been dropped in the Hudson.

In the tank’s farthest corner was a spot the sunlight didn’t touch. I squinted at it, then froze.

The last time our eyes met, el tritón’s face was a cast of horror. But he’d apparently gotten over last night’s shock. His narrow glare was the East River’s deadly chill personified, and it held me in place like a finger pointed at my chest.

“Mr. Caldera?”

I spun around. My duffel slipped off my shoulder, sending my cuatro case tumbling to the floor before I could catch it. Samuel Morgan was standing stock still to my left in the wing of the stage managing to look surprised, confused, and agitated all at once—before a heavy splash turned my head and everything else I was holding crashed to the floor.

From liquid stillness, the water started churning and swirling until it became a roiling, frothy maelstrom.

“Budge up, son.” Morgan strode toward me and pulled his pistol from the inside pocket of his waistcoat.

“M-Mr. Morgan?” I squeaked.

He stepped around me. “It’s not for you.”

A thunderclap exploded in my ears, vibrating the stage under my feet, only Morgan’s gun hadn’t fired. Rather, el tritón had flung himself at the glass, sending a spray of water over the top that slapped the ground at our feet, soaked my duffle, and nearly made me tap a kidney all over my only clean undergarments.

“There’s no sense exhausting yourself!” Morgan shouted at the swirling fizz over our heads. He banged the pistol repeatedly against an iron corner bracket. “Can you understand me? That—glass—can’t—be—broken!”

The churning subsided.

There, pressed into the high corner like a fox in a hole, was the merman. His face was hidden under an eddy of long copper-colored hair with seashell beads woven into braids that ran along his temples. As his locks settled around his shoulders, I made out the dark gash across his brow where he’d gotten hurt last night, no longer bleeding, but still raised and raw. I watched, stunned silent, as he slid slowly down the wall into a heap. He landed in partial sunlight where I could see the rest of him better.

From the waist up, his skin was like blue- and green-tinted metal, a shade darker than the Statue of Liberty, with a lean, chiseled chest and shoulders made for cleaving through currents.

Compared to his upper half, his tail was a deeper blue, with a silvery turquoise stripe and a dense arrangement of scales that glittered like sapphires and pearls. At the end of it, long flowing fronds set between sharp spines wafted gently; they caught the light as they moved, reflecting a rainbow iridescence like kerosene on water.

A warning flickered in the petrified corners of my mind that I was seeing something I shouldn’t be seeing. When I peered at his face again, I shrank back. Once more, his clear eyes fastened on mine like he was telegraphing his plans for my murder right into my head.

Morgan was the one who killed the mermaid and captured him; why was he staring daggers at me ?

“We’re still getting used to each other,” grumbled Morgan, rubbing at his temple.

“Shouldn’t we be wearing earplugs right now?” I whispered.

“I’d say that awful noise it made last night debunked conventional wisdom regarding the dangers of its voice.” Turning to look upon me as a parent would upon un nene who’d just knocked over la cafetera , he added, “I didn’t realize we’d be seeing you so soon, Benny. To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Well, you said—or Miss Kutzler said, I guess—to come and visit.”

“In the offseason?”

“Well, you know, I just figured I’d check on the commission. Make sure it was holding up with a full tank plus the, uh...” I pursed my lips toward the bars without looking at them.

Morgan cut his eyes toward the tank, then back at me, like my presence was a riddle he wasn’t awake enough to solve. “With a guitar?”

I cleared my throat. “I’m between apartments at the moment.”

“What in the Bill Bailey is all the racket out here?” a familiar voice offstage said over the impatient clack of heels up wooden steps. Sonia’s ruby head popped out from behind the curtain, and catching sight of me, her dainty features flipped from confusion to delight.

“Kiddo!” she cried, hoisting her tweed skirt hem to dash toward us. I hadn’t said a word before her arms were squeezing the blood out of my neck. “Sam, why didn’t you mention Benny was here? Oh, I honestly didn’t think you was gonna make the journey, what with you being the industrious type and all, but you’re just full of surprises, ain’t ya! I’ll bet you didn’t know we kept busy in the offseason even though the seaside’s a ghost town—”

“Miss Kutzler, button up before you wear our ears off,” Morgan groaned as he slipped his roscoe back into his pocket.

Sonia rolled her eyes. “In a minute. Benny, how’s your hand?”

She reached for it to look, but I crammed it back into my pocket. “It’s jake! I’m, uh—a fast healer.”

“Ain’t that lucky!” She hooked me by the arm and steered me toward the stairs. “Let’s get out of this drafty old box, and you can tell us all about what you think of our dear Luna Park!”

“At last, a topic worth discussing,” Morgan drawled, and led the way to an exit tucked between the stage and the audience seating while Sonia latched herself to my arm.

“Wait!” I backed out of her grip. “My stuff...”

I knelt to pick up my things by the tank and hazarded one last look into the water.

El tritón no longer faced us, exposing a set of diagonal stripes across his back, ribbed and red where the net had held him. He was curled tightly into the corner now, with one webbed hand wrapped around his bruised arm and the other fisted in his hair.

I got to my feet and ran to catch up with Sonia, trying not to dwell on what I’d just learned.

Pain looks the same in merpeople as it does in humans.

Mr. Morgan guided us through a door tucked in the stage’s right wing. It led outside to a gravel path at the end of which stood a shabby midway tent. As we walked, Sonia gabbed, describing in mouthwatering detail the scents of hot dogs and friedcakes, manic scenes of patrons tugging each other from one attraction to the next amidst clacking coasters and noisy calliopes playing “Hands Across the Sea.” Morgan opened the canvas flap so she could escort me inside.

The tent was chillier than a butcher shop, with pipe smoke–stained canvas walls. It housed a sort of makeshift office, with a maple table in the middle of an oriental rug and a matching maple writing desk against the corner where a folding partition wall stuck out of the canvas.

Sonia sat me down at the table and dragged the corner chair over so she could keep chewing my ear off from a seated position.

“The gentry, the sweat shoppers, immigrants, sailors, families, sweethearts—everyone who’s anyone is here in the summer. Sad and lonely goops come too, but you just put ’em on the Canals of Venice ride next to a pretty face, and voilà—”

“My dear Miss Kutzler, you asked for his opinion.” Mr. Morgan reached into his desk drawer, pulled out a pipe, and slumped into the chair across from us. “Will you stop flapping your tongue and let him give it?”

Sonia flushed and closed her mouth, leaving me rummaging for an opinion. Truth was, I hadn’t managed a complete thought since the merman had skewered me with his eyes.

“This place is really something,” I said. “Never seen anything like it.”

Smiling, Morgan lit his pipe and blew several puffs into the air above our faces. “Of course you haven’t,” he said loftily. “Luna Park is the standard-bearer of seaside entertainment, however much Reynolds thinks he can put us out of business.”

There was that name again, only now I knew why it kept coming up. “Mr. Barnes mentioned something about that. Dreamland—or Reynolds—copying Luna Park, I mean.”

Morgan harrumphed and took another pull from the pipe. “That pretentious skunk thinks he can outclass our establishment,” he said in a billow of smoke. “Capable though he may be at smearing white glaze on someone else’s art and calling it original, he can’t copy a live merman, can he?”

I couldn’t argue with that. This Reynolds guy would be hard-pressed to find anything on earth that could compete with the merman in the tank without catching one himself—and, unlike Morgan, that guy probably hadn’t spent a lifetime figuring out how.

“I happen to agree with your appraisal of Luna,” Morgan remarked, blowing a hoop of smoke for us to admire, “but what of our corner of it?”

“It’s great,” I said. “Really great. Except...” Questions like this always felt like a trick. In a contest between hearing an unhappy truth and being lied to, folks would almost always rather get snowed. I shot a nervous glance at Sonia, who waited for my answer with large green eyes that didn’t blink.

Morgan leaned in. “Except?”

“It does seem a little, I dunno...” I remembered those decomposing creatures in the museo de monstruos and winced. “Run-down?”

Morgan smacked the table, and I jumped. “Of course it is! Sonia, didn’t I tell you this place was run down?”

Her pout was back. “Actually, I believe it was me who told—”

“Mr. Caldera,” he interrupted. “Between now and our May reopening, we face an uphill climb. As you’ve already noticed, our little production here is showing its age. The oddity museum is positively decrepit, the theater needs a complete renovation—we’ve got quite a lot on our plates now, and as you came such a long way to check on your handiwork, I’m curious to know just how attached are you to your current occupation?”

For better or worse I was, as of yesterday, unattached. But between telepathic mermaids and my Tití Luz , I’d been so concerned with taking orders from the deceased that I hadn’t given any real thought to what might happen once I got here. Well out of character for a guy who ran calculations just to cross Van Brunt Street in rush hour.

Morgan noticed my hesitation. “Fate favors a bold spirit,” he said, “and a lad who can make art from metal and be relied upon in a pinch to help pull off the greatest acquisition in sideshow history is a bold spirit indeed. Our friend Oscar is a hardworking fellow, but he is neither discreet nor an artist, and I need both to make this production worthy of its new star.”

This man was absolutely full of shit. But he’d also called me a bold spirit.

And that was a damn sight better than being called Wheezy.

“Guess I could make the commute.”

“No commute. The exhibits share a house on West Twelfth Street called the Albemarle. You’ll live with them, just a stroll down the street.” His words rolled out quickly, leaving no room for sensible reservations to intrude. “How does fifty cents an hour sound in exchange for maintaining the tank and putting a fresh coat of paint on our establishment?”

Fifty cents an hour? That was more chavo than even a job in Ornamental would have earned! How could he justify the expense when this place was only open six months out of the year?

Olvídate , it wasn’t my place to sort that out for him. “Sounds like a deal,” I said.

“Capital!” Morgan stood and held out his hand. I stood up into a cloud of pipe smoke and shook it, careful to match his grip.

Sonia leapt up as well. “Oh, just you wait ’til you meet the rest of the gang, Benny,” she said, pulling me by the arm with strength that hadn’t been there yesterday. “They’ll be over the moon when they hear you’re joining us!”

As we reached the tent flap, Morgan cleared his throat. We both looked back.

“Our conversation continues tomorrow, all right, Sonia?”

I might have imagined it, but the Fraülein’s sparkle seemed to lose some luster. “Sure, Sam. Tomorrow.”

“Splendid.” He set the pipe back between his teeth. “Welcome to the Menagerie, Benny.”