Page 9

S onia met me under the awning in her winter coat and muff ready to lead us back down Surf Avenue. Between asking me questions she immediately answered herself, complaining about being the youngest person in the Menagerie, and vowing to spit in Dreamland’s man-made lake, the Fraülein’s company was a lot like the train ride down. I didn’t have to do anything but take it in.

Before I knew it, we had arrived at the long porch of a red-gabled mansion three stories tall with a large sign hanging over the sidewalk that read “ALBEMARLE HOTEL, L.M. Porter Prop.”

“A hotel?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, we got our own place in back. A necessary amenity for us curious types.” She pulled me past the front gate into a tight, earthy-smelling alleyway between the Albemarle and Moxie’s Cigar Shoppe.

The narrow path eventually widened to a wooden staircase that led to a second-floor entrance. Following Sonia up the creaking steps, I kept thinking about that empty spot in the Menagerie’s hallway—whether I’d find out whose act had darkened the wallpaper before the poster disappeared.

Sonia pounded on the storm door. “Ich bin zuhause, mein Lieben! Open up, we got company!”

The inside door swung open, bringing me eye level with an enormous silver belt buckle.

My gaze slowly lifted. “ Santa María .”

The belt of said buckle was holding up the trousers of a man so tall the door frame cut off his whole head from view. I backed up until I nearly fell over the guardrail.

“This is making third day this week without keys,” the man grumbled, his voice so deep it could have come from the hotel basement. “Perhaps is lost?”

“I know where they are,” Sonia muttered with an eye roll. “I just can’t seem to remember to move them out of my purse ever since Sam turned my dressing room into a shrine to Morton’s salt and changed the locks.”

She reached back, grabbed my coat sleeve, and yanked me forward.

“This is Mr. Benny Caldera,” Sonia announced proudly, sidling around the screen door to steer me inside. “He built the new exhibit, and wouldn’t you know, he’s gonna be one of us now!”

An airless noise came out of my mouth as I craned my neck to make eye contact with a real-life giant.

“Ah, you is iron man, yes?” boomed el gigante. “I am Igor Rybakov of Moscow.”

From my vantage point five feet below his face, I made out black hair streaked with gray, a low brow, and a chin curtain that made him look like Abraham Lincoln’s distant Russian relative. When we shook hands, his fist ate up the bottom third of my forearm.

“Where are you lazy good-for-nothings?” Sonia yelled into the hall, maneuvering me into a parlor where the window looked out on the scenic railway ride.

“Miss Vera, Eli, Emmett, and Matthias are gone to market. I get it the coffee,” said Igor, ducking under the rafter and around the corner.

She blew him a kiss and started taking off my coat.

“Oh, you don’t have to—”

Sonia tutted and wrenched it off me in stark contrast to yesterday’s flimsy handshake. “Put away your charm school manners. They won’t do you no good here.”

She marched off in Igor’s direction with everything I had, except my cuatro and a dim sense that the last eighteen hours of my life had been one very long dream. The light aroma of cigarettes and kerosene lured me farther into the room where my eyes took in rose-colored damask walls, cherrywood furniture, a clean oriental rug, and a Tiffany lamp, which sat on an end table between me and a modest brick fireplace.

On either side of a bureau, two bookshelves were stocked like someone had raided a Coney Island souvenir shop and brought home the loot, overrun with carnival trinkets, postcards, mugs, souvenir dishes, and ships in bottles. In the center of the chaise, an embroidered pillow read: “With It. For It. Never Against It.”

Jesucristo , this place made the tenement look like a hovel—

“So, you’re the Porto Rican Sonia’s been gabbing about,” came a soft voice to my right.

I turned around to find a woman smirking at me. She had been so quiet, I’d thought I was alone, which just went to show how distracted I was.

What God had given Igor in length, he had given this woman in weight.

“Louisa Porter, resident fat lady,” she introduced, lifting her dimpled hand toward me. “But you can call me Lulu.”

I took it and smiled. “Benny.”

“You look like you just turned up at a rodeo with no horse, Benny,” she said wryly. “As most of the men Sonia brings home tend to do.”

I peeled my hat off my head. “Sorry—what’s a rodeo?”

She giggled, a sound so easy and warm that I laughed along. “Take a load off. No one here’s gonna bite you.”

“Right. Thanks.” I sat in the nearest chair, twisted my fingers in my necklace, and didn’t know where to put my eyes. Her poster had said it took seven men to hug her—an obvious miscalculation—but she was certainly the heaviest woman I’d ever seen, though I supposed everyone looks heavy to a guy who’d grown up during a famine. In lieu of a chair, she sat on an upholstered bench beside a walking cane; with her wavy brown hair swept up in a stylish knot and delicately rouged face, she couldn’t have been older than thirty.

Lulu cleared her throat. “You’re allowed to look at me, you know.”

“Hm? Oh. Sorry, I didn’t wanna be—” My turn to clear my throat. “So, the sign out there says you own this place? It’s nice!”

“Thanks. My husband Charlie, God rest ’im, was the original proprietor. Before his buggy met the front end of an Oldsmobile roadster at twenty miles per hour, that is.”

“Aw, gosh, I’m really sorry,” I repeated.

“Hey, you weren’t driving the car, were you? These things happen, and it’s a good thing being fat turns a nice profit,” she said without irony. “Speaking of, I’m also the company costumer, which gives me the unique leverage of knowing too much about the dimensions of everyone else in this house. Now, what’s this Sonia’s saying about you joining the Menagerie?”

“ Mama! ” A flash of yellow curls darted past my legs attached to a kid who threw himself at Lulu’s skirt and hid his face. Maybe he was part of the show too—he looked like a live cherub.

“Shararti ladka! That little terror is going to destroy my library!” cried a high-pitched voice I instantly recognized as Madam Navya’s. She stomped into the room, a torn sheet of paper in her fist.

“Timothy Franklin Porter, what did you do?” Lulu groaned.

“Just wookin’,” came the muffled voice from Lulu’s skirts.

“Looking indeed! Look at this !” The madam thrust the shard of paper up at Lulu. “This boy has no respect for the Holy Puranas!”

Lulu shot her son a withering glare. “What have I told you about digging through the madam’s books?”

“I wanted to see the ewo-phant,” he whined.

“ Ganesha , you simple boy,” Navya snapped. “If this goblin could sit still for a minute of his life, I would teach him about the deities, but instead he prefers to desecrate my sacred texts!”

Lulu pinched the spot between her eyebrows and drew a calming breath. “Look, I’m sorry, and so is Timmy, right ?” she said pointedly at her son. He wagged his head so rigorously, curls bounced around his face. “I will replace your Puranas, Navya, I promise,” Lulu said sincerely. “In the meantime, perhaps both of you want to greet our guest?”

“Hi,” I said with a weak wave.

Timmy’s greeting involved burrowing his face into his mother’s skirt again. Madam Navya folded her arms across her chest.

“I have already met Mr. Benny,” she said in a tired voice. “Last night, he tried to pick me up with his hands.”

So much for first impressions.

Sonia arrived just as Navya left muttering complaints in her other language. “What’s got her garters in a knot?”

Lulu’s face drooped with the exhaustion of every mother whose nene caused more problems than she had fixes for. “One guess.”

“Aw, not this little angel ,” Sonia cooed, scooping the boy up into her arms to tickle him.

“He is a demon!” Navya corrected from across the house.

The screen door’s groan ended the debate. “There weren’t nothing but flounder at the market today, so I won’t hear no belly-aching,” shouted a coarser voice than I’d heard so far, with an Irish accent, though not from Ulster. A tall woman stepped into view. Her charcoal overcoat swept the floor, and from under a feathered hat, tawny ringlets poked out over freckles and an unpainted face. A cigarillo hung from her lips.

She halted in the entryway at the sight of me. “Oi! No one said I were feedin’ an extra mouth!”

Matthias’s head stuck out from behind her. “That ain’t a mouth, that’s Benny!” He squeezed his formidable self past the woman to deliver a friendly smack that knocked the tension right out of my shoulders. “Vera, this here’s the Porto Rican prodigy from Red Hook,” he said, while the lady took one more drag, then laid the cigarillo in an ashtray for safekeeping. “Benny, meet Ms. Vera Campbell.”

“You’re, the, uh... fire-breather?” I asked, putting the clues together.

“And you’re the accomplice,” she said, grinning with her hand outstretched. “Hope you like flambéed flounder.”

As I shook her hand, Matthias’s brow lifted. “Say, ain’t that the hand you barbecued yesterday?”

I snatched it back. “Uh, yeah, turns out it wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

Thankfully, he pondered me for only a moment before asking what northern wind had brought me south. I told him I’d come to check on the tank and see whether I might still be useful to the Menagerie after humiliating myself at the Ironworks the other day, prompting Matthias to give me another congratulatory golpetazo on the shoulder. “So you went to Luna Park,” he sniggered, “and you came out alive?”

“Yeah, the merman wasn’t too happy to see me.”

Matthias’s thick hand slid his glasses down his nose and snorted. “I wasn’t talking about the merman.”

“Stop it, you’re gonna spook ’im,” said Sonia, smacking him on the arm. “Where’re the twins?”

“Here,” grumbled another familiar voice from the foyer. “We need a new place for hooch, fellas. Those goldbricks over on Eighth ain’t got nothing but piss water and absinthe—hey now, look who it is!”

Striding into the room was Eli, who seemed pleased to see me, followed soon after by Emmett, who very much didn’t. I blinked; beyond their matching blond hair, they didn’t look nearly as alike in the daylight as they had last night.

“C’mere, Emmett, it’s the hero of the hour, Benny!” he said, clapping me on the shoulder as I gave an awkward left-handed wave.

“You have my socks,” Emmett said coolly.

“Oh.” I looked down at my feet. “Sorry, I... I’m still wearing them, actually. Sonia said you wouldn’t mind.”

Emmett swung his glare on her.

“Well, you shouldn’t mind,” she huffed. “With only one foot, you’ve got one too many of every pair anyway.”

Emmett and I both gawped at her before a tea tray descended from the sky and settled between our faces. Igor’s bass voice rippled down into my boots.

“Is ready, the coffee.”

Dinner was burned fish, blackened peas, and charred mashed potatoes. By way of an explanation, Eli was quick to tell me that sharing the house required sharing cooking duty—and that Vera incinerated every item on the menu whenever it was her turn in the kitchen.

The company, as they referred to themselves, carried on with an easy blend of warmth and hostility, teasing and poking at each other like siblings without a parent between them—unless you counted Lulu, who volleyed between managing Timmy’s table manners and managing everyone else’s. With so many accents competing to be heard, their dynamic was a toss-up between a brood of misfits and an international alliance.

We had something in common, though. We all cleaned our plates despite Vera’s culinary deficiencies, which told me more about my new housemates than their posters in the Menagerie ever could.

You only swallow ashes if you know what it’s like to go hungry.

Eli passed around absinthe at dessert with pieces of sweet rugelach from the local Jewish bakery to help cut the burn of licorice-flavored lava. It wasn’t long before the booze had settled pleasantly in the tips of my ears—and loosened my tongue.

“I couldn’t help noticing you all seem a little... different from the posters of you hanging in the park,” I said. “The stuff they say about you—is any of it real?”

“I think our new friend here is having some trouble telling truth from fiction,” Matthias observed. He leaned back in his chair and held up a finger. “Sideshow Rule Number One: Real is whatever’s in your head.”

“Now, now,” Vera said, blowing a new ring of smoke into the cloud over her head, “I were a tried and true fire-breather.”

“You could try keeping your act out of the kitchen for once.” Emmett sat slack in his chair, rubbing his stomach queasily. “I’ll be belchin’ smoke for a— Hey! What’d you do that for!”

Vera had dropped her cigarillo in his drink like she’d just dropped a coin in the church collection plate. “There’s the rest of your dessert, ya New Jersey git.”

“Speakin’ of smoke”—Sonia stood up from the table and began unlacing her boots—“Vera, hand me one, will you?”

The fire-breather shot her a look of extreme inconvenience before handing over a new cigarillo, which Sonia set between her lips. Sonia then gestured to Emmett, who sulkily dug a match out of his pocket and flicked it across the table where she caught it—then wedged it between her black-stockinged toes.

“Now it’s a party,” Eli declared. “Don’t blink, Benny.”

Blink? But where was I supposed to look?

I forgot to bite into my rugelach as Sonia folded over by the waist like saltwater taffy and laid her forearms flat against the floor. Slowly, her spine stacked on top of itself until rolls of tweed skirt were balanced on her bright red bun like whipped cream on a cupcake.

From there, her legs lifted smoothly over her head, toes still gripping the match angled sharply toward the ground. Her limbs didn’t so much as tremble as she raised a hand to the matchstick and, with a scratch of her fingernail, brought a flame to life.

Then with the casual air of a lady enjoying an evening smoke, Sonia lit the cigarillo... with her foot .

My dessert thunked back onto my plate.

Claps and laughter erupted around me. Even Emmett condescended to raise his glass in Sonia’s honor, and as soon as my brain caught up, I joined him. Madam Navya alone looked morally outraged.

The Fraülein took a smug drag on Vera’s rompepecho. “Real enough for ya, Benny?”

“I’m sold!”

Sonia unknotted her appendages. With a demure curtsey, she plucked the cigarillo from her lips and offered it to me. “This one’s on the house.”

I leaned away from it and laughed. “No, thanks. My lungs and cigarettes ain’t on good terms.”

Vera leaned over the table and snatched it out of Sonia’s fingers. “I’ll take that.”

“I gotta hand it to you, Sonia,” Matthias said, still clapping. “You’re the only one who passes for normal, but you’re probably the oddest carny in this company.”

“Being a carny don’t require being odd on the outside,” she remarked, shaking her skirt out. “It’s a state of mind.”

“Yeah, the state of desperation,” Eli snorted.

I leaned forward in my chair. “How’d you guys wind up in a sideshow anyway?”

Emmett thumbed at his nose and cracked his first smile of the evening, though I wouldn’t call it pleasant. “We’d tell you, but then we’d have to kill you.”

“Shut up, Em,” Matthias muttered.

“We are here by the ineffable movements of fate,” said Madam Navya with liquored-up authority. “I’ve long believed we were all of us warring kinsmen in a past life, brought back together in this life that we might yet learn how not to kill each other.”

Igor dabbed his mouth with his absurdly small handkerchief. “Is also much more pleasant for to be famous than feared. Is not so loud, the screaming.”

Madam Navya hiccupped. “That too.”

“Speak for yerselves,” Vera remarked, unbuttoning the lace around her collar. “I came here to strike terror into the heart of every eejit who confuses me for some starchy mot in skirts. I been beggin’ Lulu here to make me britches ever since the season ended so’s I can stop stealing Eli’s.”

Lulu snatched the fork from Timmy’s hand before he could finish gouging a stick figure into the arm of his high chair, then pointed it at Vera. “I don’t see you offering to watch Timmy so I can make ’em.”

“Jesus, I’ll watch Timmy,” groaned Eli. “I’m running out of pants.”

Sonia leaned forward and propped her head on her hand. “It’s your story I wanna hear,” she said. “What tale of intrigue brought a Porto Rican blacksmith to the Empire City?”

I pushed my cup away. “It ain’t that intriguing.”

“I don’t believe that for a second. Spill it.”

My usual reflex to interrogations was withdrawal, so I was surprised when I realized I wanted to spill it. Maybe the absinthe had primed me with a brash impulse to entertain the entertainers. Or maybe, with so little left to lose, I thought I’d try my hand at being the sort of guy who opens up to strangers without worrying they’ll stick a knife through the gap.

“I snuck aboard a steamer.”

Everyone seemed to sit up straighter. Sonia’s eyes flashed in anticipation of a juicy story. “You were a stowaway ?”

“Is that what you’d call it?”

“Sneaking aboard ships is very risky behavior indeed,” Madam Navya said, though she’d directed it at Timmy.

I licked my finger and dabbed up the crumbs off my plate. “Not that risky. I was eighteen. I had no family left, no future, so I climbed aboard the USS Carolina in the middle of the night. Hid under some dirty sheets in the linen room.”

Emmett’s eyes were on me as he poured himself and Eli another shot. “And you weren’t caught?”

“Oh, I got caught,” I laughed. “I was only on the ship three hours when a camarero —that is, a guy on the waitstaff—found me. Dragged me and my cuatro to the chief steward, but by then my lungs had already started making trouble. And I guess he felt sorry for me ’cause next thing I know, he’s telling the seaman who’d found me to get me a mop and a bed in steerage.”

“I’ll be damned,” Matthias murmured.

“Yeah. Would’ve been nicer waiting tables instead, but I didn’t know English yet.”

“This kid’s sellin’ us a thumper,” said Emmett. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “You stowed away on a steamship. Didn’t speak no English. And you expect us to believe you landed a job in a Red Hook ironworks right off the boat?”

“Good English don’t build cities,” I said curtly. “Good smithies do.”

“And yet Benny here speaks it like he been livin’ in Brooklyn since before it became a borough,” Matthias observed as he took a pencil and notebook out of his pocket. “How long did that take? Anyone teach you?”

“You’re writing this down?” Emmett balked.

“’Bout a year,” I said, taking Matthias’s cue to ignore Eli’s brother. “I dunno, it’s not too different from learning music. My ears are good at picking up sounds and my mouth’s good at spitting ’em back out. I used to do impressions of my old coworkers.”

“Ooh, I wanna hear an impression!” cried Vera.

“Me too!” Sonia seconded, prompting thirds from others around the table.

“Good idea,” Emmett said, with a bite that made me wonder if his beef with me had nothing to do with socks. “How’s about you do one of old Igor here?”

Igor’s face brightened. “To hear that, I would be truly eager!”

By now, it sure looked like I’d left Farty behind only to replace him with the Coney Island model. Fine. If Emmett wanted proof so badly, I’d let him have it.

I examined Igor’s face—the broad lips over his Abe Lincoln beard—and imagined the boom that rumbled from his long neck. The words would be easy enough; I wrapped my tongue around them and pulled them into the back of my mouth where my ears told me Igor talked.

Finally, I imagined my throat twice as long and felt it open.

“ To hear that, I would be truly eager ,” I said in my very best Russian Giant.

Gasps chorused around the table.

“ Aye Haye! This man is possessed!” Madam Navya gasped.

Laughter burst out of me in a way it hadn’t since I was un nene . Matthias smacked the table so hard I thought the oak might buckle. “Holy shit, the guy’s a Leonardo!”

“You’re in the wrong line of work, kiddo,” Sonia gushed, eyes wide. “With a skill like that, why the hell aren’t you on stage with the rest of us?”

“Well, the stage is occupied right now, ain’t it?” I snorted, taking another sip from my cup.

A subtle shift in the air put out our levity like one of Vera’s rompepechos . Everyone suddenly seemed very interested in the contents of their cups. Igor got up and lumbered to the kitchen.

“I say something wrong?”

Eli shifted uneasily in his chair. “Nah. We just ain’t as keen on the new exhibit as Sam is.”

“Merman’s a feckin’ tinderbox,” Vera slurred. “An’ everyone knows you don’t mix fire-breathers with tinderboxes.”

“ You weren’t the one Sam hung out there like a worm on a hook,” Sonia said indignantly. “Stranded out there like a couple o’ schmucks... If Matthias hadn’t been there, I’d’ve died of fright thinking I was gonna be dragged overboard by some slippery sea savage.”

“Morgan’s choices... s’will visit punishment upon us all,” Madam Navya hiccupped gravely. “S’what happens when you imprison a deity.”

“It ain’t a deity ,” Matthias scoffed. “But I’ll tell you what. Once the merman starts raking in dough, I’ll eat my hat if Morgan still remembers our names in a month.”

“Would he? Forget your names?” I’d known these folks for less than a day and already knew I’d never forget them.

“It’s like this. We got a credo in our line of work,” Lulu explained. “It goes: With it, for it, never against it.”

“That was on the pillow in the parlor,” I said, “but what exactly is ‘it’?”

“‘It’ is the sideshow,” Matthias replied. “But it’s also the sideshow life . Being ‘with it, for it, and never against it’ means being tied to this here family. Devoted to it. Ready to die to protect it.”

“And Sam ain’t never been the type,” Eli said, shaking his head. “It’s why he goes home to Queens every night, ’stead of hanging with us freaks in Nightmare Alley.”

“You were at the theater today, right?” Lulu asked when she saw I was still confundido . “Notice that empty spot at the end of the posters? His name was Saul Spencer, the Living Skeleton. He couldn’t help being thin like I can’t help being fat, so we’d go on stage together as a bit—make the audience guess our weights, then step on the scale to wow the crowd when they guessed wrong. Saul was the oldest Menagerie member since the days when Jack Morgan ran it as a traveling show. He was Timmy’s godfather too, and the man who put me back together after Charlie died.”

Her eyes went soft with the recollection. “When scarlet fever took him at the end of the season last year, we was all in rough shape. But not Sam. He just pulled down the poster. Like Saul was never here.”

“It’s ’cause Sam’s got his own bloody credo,” Vera clarified. “He’s with, for, and never against hisself .”

My stomach sank. This was the same guy who had charmed me into kidnapping a merman and buttered me up to renovate his theater. What if his good faith only lasted if he saw an advantage to having me around?

“Hey. Don’t worry about ol’ Sam,” Lulu said, reading the worry on my face. “Now that you’re here, you’ll be family too. And we take care of each other.”

“Family,” I snorted. “You don’t even know if you like me.”

Sonia looped her arm through mine. “Of course we like you!”

“I don’t,” Emmett muttered.

“Emmett’s opinion don’t matter on account o’ his oddity being the gigantic stick up his arse,” Vera deadpanned.

“All right,” I said slowly, “but what happens to my job when I’m done fixing the theater?”

Matthias chuckled. “Just do your Igor impression for the boss man and boom ”—he snapped his fingers—“job security.”

Igor poked his head back in. “If Benny is good cook, I give him my spot in show, no problem.”

“But...”

But I don’t belong here, I almost said, as if I’d ever belonged anywhere. The only family I’d ever had before was a well-to-do tabaquera —a tobacco farmer who’d picked me up like a stray at the edge of el Río Humacao after the San Ciriaco hurricane. Any trace of my blood relations had gotten knocked out of my head, swept away in the swollen river. After all that, the idea I could walk through the side door of the Albemarle right into a new family was nuttier than the rugelach I just ate.

But I’d been a janitor aboard the USS Carolina . I’d worked in tobacco fields, then foundries. I learned to speak English, only to realize in frustration that I’d also have to read it, then I did that too. I’d lost track of all the times I had melted myself down just to recast myself as someone with a slightly better shot at belonging someplace, and here I was being offered the brass ring, no new skills required.

I looked around at the liquor-warm faces anticipating the end of my sentence. Even Emmett looked halfway resigned to putting up with me.

“But when would I get a turn in the kitchen?” I finished to everyone’s apparent satisfaction.

Bueno. Almost everyone.

Emmett stuck his finger at my face. “When you give back my damn socks.”

I lent Lulu my arm to lean on as she led us slowly up the creaking staircase to a narrow hallway of living quarters on the third floor. “The company sleeps up here, but Timmy and I are downstairs so as not to disturb anyone’s peace,” she said with a smirk to indicate peace might just be subjective where her nene was concerned. At the end of the hall, she unlocked the cherrywood door and pushed it open, standing aside to let me through. “You get Saul’s old room.”

Remnants of the Human Skeleton’s spartan existence still lay about—an ivory comb and pomade on the dresser, a silk top hat hanging off the standing mirror in the corner, and a writing desk by the window where a few framed photographs were arranged, including one of him and Lulu together onstage smiling wide in monochrome to an invisible audience. I picked it up.

Saul looked like un hambriento , the way his skin draped across his skull like soaked linen, the knobs of bone and cartilage poking sharply through his three-piece suit.

Lulu walked me through the keys on the key ring. “This goes to the side door, this one to the main door, this one to enter the park, and this one”—she singled out a tarnished brass key—“opens our dear old Menagerie.”

I took it and ran a finger over the heart-shaped knot in the middle of the bow. “Mr. Morgan won’t mind me having one of these?”

“What belonged to Saul belongs to me now. And I’m giving it to you.”

Tití Luz would have warned me not to take the room of a guy so recently departed. But if Saul’s ghost was still hanging around, I didn’t mind if it meant having a real bed and a cotton quilt that smelled like starch and labdanum aftershave instead of charred coal.

But as lamps went out across the Albemarle that night, not even the comfy bed could keep the merman’s steely glare from haunting me. Not that I wasn’t used to being glared at; between the brethren of Irish ironworkers and the gentry of Nueva York , it was the daily reality of living where my existence was offensive.

Despite all that, the merman’s judgment felt different. I kept wondering why I was its target instead of Morgan who’d been the architect of his circumstances. But if I had to guess, the merman wasn’t leering at me because I’d killed the mermaid or helped kidnap him. In the same way I resented everyone who’d ever stood by while Farty Walsh tortured me at the furnaces, el tritón leered at me because I’d watched.

And I’d done nothing to stop it.