Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray
Sam didn’t open up to many people. But there was something about Evie that drew him out and made him vulnerable. Sam had been up in an aeroplane with Barnstormin’ Belle. He’d flown on the trapeze and walked a wire with the circus. Most people thought that was bravery. But nothing was braver than letting somebody really know you, warts and all. Nothing was braver than trying to love and be loved. He shut his eyes and imagined Evie in his arms. And then his hand was reaching under the blanket as he fumbled with his pajama bottoms. It was Evie he thought about while he touched himself. Evie he wanted so much it was almost a physical ache. Evie he saw as the pressure built. Sam groaned and arched as the exquisite rush zoomed through him. He was sweating and flushed.
“Jesus,” he said, panting.
Jesus didn’t answer.
Ling had gone to bed clutching Alma’s hair ribbon. When she awoke inside the dream, she was at a dance marathon. Under a glittery cardboard half-moon that dangled from a string, couples with numbers on their backs moved around the edges of the wooden floor—all except for Alma. She danced alone in the center, a ballet of one. Ling watched her pirouette and high-step in awe. She moved closer and closer until she was standing in the center, too, while Alma danced around Ling. It made Ling dizzy, so she closed her eyes, feeling Alma’s presence, like atoms swirling, becoming something new. She shivered all over; her skin tingled. Ling tilted her head back, grinning, leaning into the energy Alma created. It was almost like being caressed by the dream itself. And when Ling opened her eyes, the moon threw off sparkling prisms of light as it twirled on its string high above her.
Mabel woke just after six. Beside her, Arthur slept peacefully, his lips—the lips that had been all over her just hours ago—parted just slightly. He was so beautiful. Mabel ached between her legs, but she wanted to do it all again. It had been the most incredible night of her life. But the longer she lay in Arthur’s bed, listening to his gentle breathing, the more a panic-limned doubt began to seep in: We blew up Jake Marlowe’s mine! Last night, as she’d watched it all burn, she’d thought, You won’t be making money off the backs of poor people anymore. It had felt righteous. It had felt like justice.
But now, in the early morning’s cold light, she wondered: Had they done right? No one had been hurt. The Marlowe mine and the company store, the symbols of all that was wrong with management, had been destroyed. Still. They’d made change with bombs. With that one act, Mabel had turned her back on everything her parents had taught her.
Mabel needed to talk to someone or she’d go mad. She slipped out of bed and crept down the stairs. Mr. Jenkins kept a telephone behind the counter near the cash register. She dialed the number she knew by heart and waited as the operator put her through.
“Mmm’lo,” Evie mumbled on the other end. “Wrong party…”
“Evie? Evie, don’t hang up! It’s Mabel.”
“Mabel…” Evie slurred, half-asleep still. “Wh-What time’s it?”
“Very late. Or very early. Depending.”
On the other end, Evie was fighting to stay alert. Mabel could hear it. “Oh, I’ve missed you so much. You a’right, Mabesie?”
Mabesie. With one word, Mabel was pierced. She wanted to tell Evie everything—about the raid. The dynamite. How exciting it had been. How Arthur Brown had looked with the fire behind him—a terrible angel, a beautiful monster. About what they had done in his bed. What she wanted was to hear Evie tutting that Mabel worried too much and to go to sleep; everything would look better in the morning. She wanted to hear of Evie’s trivial troubles: A dull party. A runner in her favorite stockings. Sarah Snow. But their lives were worlds apart now. Mabel and the Six were fighting for real change; Evie and the others chased down ghosts. Mabel had never even seen a ghost. She’d taken Evie’s word for it that ghosts existed. But maybe it was time to stop taking Evie’s word for things. Maybe if you didn’t believe in ghosts, you didn’t see them.
Mabel had called Evie out of habit, she now realized, like trying to suck your thumb when you were long past its comfort and feeling foolish for it.
“I’m fine,” Mabel said. “I’m with friends.”
“What friends?” Evie sounded hurt.
Mabel ignored her. “I just wanted…” To say I miss you. To pretend that we could be best friends the way we used to be. “I just wanted to see how you were getting along.”
“At six thirty in the AM?” Evie mumbled sleepily.
“Sorry. Go back to bed.”
“Wait!” Evie said. “Mabesie, I miss you. I’m sorry ’bout what I did.”
Mabel blinked up at the ceiling. It was leaking. She moved the garbage pail into place with her foot.
“Say, let’s make a plan, mm-kay? A won’erful, won’erful plan,” Evie murmured.
Mabel blinked faster. “Sure. We’ll do that. Go back to bed.”
“Okay, then.” Evie yawned. “Tomorrow. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“It is tomorrow,” Mabel said, and hung up.
Mabel crept back into Arthur’s flat. Dawn was struggling to be born.
“Mabel?” Arthur called. “Where’d ya go?”
“Nowhere,” Mabel said. He was so handsome and rumpled.
Arthur reached out to her with one hand. He folded down the covers. “Come back to bed. I’ll warm you up.”
You’ve made your bed, now you’ll have to lie in it, Mabel’s grandmother had said to Mabel’s mother once upon a time. Mabel had made her choice. There was no going back.
She slipped between the sheets and into Arthur’s arms.
Everything was different now.
In the early dawn, Jake Marlowe’s mine still smoldered. The wisps of gray smoke joined the mist dancing along the tops of the blue hills. The day’s first light shadowed the canvas tents where, inside, the miners and their families slept and dreamed. On the edge of the camp, the militiamen gathered. They passed the guns down the line, hand over hand until all were armed.
The foreman pulled back the chamber on his rifle.
“Let ’em have it.”
FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE
“I hate to say good-bye,” Mabel said as she leaned against the doorway of Arthur’s garret. She wanted nothing more than to lead him back to bed and spend the day in his arms. But she’d been gone too long as it was.
“That makes two of us,” Arthur said, kissing her deeply. “See you tonight?”
Mabel nodded. Tonight and tomorrow and forever, she wanted to say.
Arthur stood at the window, looking down. Mabel waved up at him and he waved back as she went on her way. Across the street, the man in the brown fedora stood under the street lamp, staring up. He tucked his newspaper under his arm and turned up Bleecker Street. Arthur slipped out of the bookshop and followed the man, keeping a safe distance all the way to Bedford Street, where the man knocked at number eighty-six: Chumley’s. Arthur waited a few minutes, then went in. The brown-hatted man was already at a table in the back, a drink in hand.
Arthur took a seat next to him and ordered a Coca-Cola.
“You’re late,” the man growled without looking over.
“I couldn’t get away.”
The man snorted. “I’ll bet. You responsible for that business at Marlowe’s mine?”
“You told me to gain their trust. To encourage them.”
“Well, you certainly did that.” The man took out a pack of Wrigley’s gum. He offered it to Arthur, who shook his head. “And what about Mabel Rose?”
Arthur’s jaw tightened. “What about her?”
“She’s the enemy. Or have you forgotten?”
Arthur sipped his soda. “You don’t know her. She’s a good egg.”
“She’s the daughter of muckraking socialists. She cavorts with Diviners and anarchists. I’d say that’s far from innocent. The Bureau wants her taken down, too. We get her, we get her parents. We get her parents, we get a whole load of socialists in jail.”
“That wasn’t part of my deal.”
“You
“I had to make a decision. Nobody got hurt!”
“Keep it down.” The man waited until the people around them had gone back to their booze. “I know you, you little agitator. You wanted to blow up that mine. And I suppose Miss Rose was part of that little excursion.”
“No. She didn’t know anything about it.”
“You lying to me, Arthur?”
Arthur stared the G-man down. “I’m telling you: She’s innocent.”
The man socked Arthur, bloodying his lip. People looked on, shocked. And then they looked away again.
“The Bureau wants an arrest. Mr. Hoover wants to purge this country of radical scum. Your job was to deliver the Secret Six, nice and neat.”
Arthur wiped his lip with his knuckles. “You already have my brother!”
“And now we want the rest. Minus you, of course. By the way, you might be interested in this. It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper. Don’t disappoint us, Mr. Brown.” The man grabbed his brown hat, squaring it over his ears, and left the newspaper on the table.
Arthur read the front page. Then he went into the bathroom to throw up.
Arthur wandered to Washington Square Park, where he sat for hours, watching the cars drive under the arch, the newspaper still tucked under his arm. By the time he returned to his apartment, the Secret Six were there waiting for him.
“There you are!” Gloria said. “We were about to send out a search party.”
“Arthur, what is it?” Mabel asked, concerned. “And what happened to your lip?”
He swiped a mug from the sink, filled it with cold water from the tap and swallowed it all down. Then he dropped into a chair and buried his face in his hands, squeezing his fingers in his hair.
“Arthur?” Mabel said, softer this time.
He swiped a hand down over his face. “Early this morning, the militia boys went after the miners with guns. The women and children took cover in the holes they’d dug inside the tents.” Arthur paused. He was fighting for every word. Mabel felt as if he were speaking to her from very far away, as if she were in a dream and her one mission was to keep whatever he said next from coming out. “It was chaos in the camp. And then the lanterns caught on one of the tents. The wind was strong.”
“No,” Gloria whispered, burying her face in her hands. “No, no, no, no.”
“The women and children were trapped in the tents. The tents were on fire. The children…” Arthur stumbled on the word. “The children screamed. And the men just kept shooting.”
“Those sons of bitches,” Aron said, sniffing back tears. Mabel had never seen Aron cry.
“Hearst is already putting the blame on the miners. Saying they started it,” Arthur said, throwing down the newspaper. Gloria scooped it up and read aloud, “‘Anarchists to Blame for Fiery Fiasco. Striking Workers Blow Up Mine and Set Fire to Camp.’ Those liars!”
“What do you expect? Marlowe can have the story written any way he likes,” Aron said.
“Twelve dead kids and they’re blaming the striking workers. And the Secret Six,” Arthur said. “Mr. Hoover has vowed to put more muscle behind finding us. I don’t think we should meet here anymore. They might be watching.”
The night before seemed incredibly far away to Mabel now. She tried to remember the feel of Arthur’s arms around her as they lay in his bed under the creaking attic roof. Everything had seemed so right; now nothing did.
“We told them to trust us,” Luis said. “We said they would be safe. That Marlowe would cave. What do we do now?”
In the high white shine of the street lamp leaking through the garret windows, Arthur’s eyes were the bright blue of the day before. “We make Marlowe pay.”
By the time they’d finished talking, it was nearly dawn. The milk wagons jangled up Bleecker Street. In the distance, the elevated Sixth Avenue train rattled around a curve. The newspapers would be hitting the streets in bundles any minute.
“Luis, you know where to get what we need.”
“Yeah. I know a fella. Doesn’t ask too many questions. He’s sympathetic to the cause.”
“Are we decided, then?” Arthur said.
“Yes.” Gloria held out her hand.
“Yes,” Aron and Luis said, adding theirs on top.
Arthur turned to Mabel.
“You’re talking about assassination. About murder,” she said, looking down at her hands. They seemed small and useless to her just now.
“Like they murdered all those children,” Gloria shot back.
“Fine. Leave her out of it. We’ll do it without her,” Aron said.
“No,” Arthur said. “It’s all of us or it’s none of us. Mabel?”
Mabel thought of her parents, fighting for justice their whole lives. She thought of their small victories, eked out by pennies. They’d always said that there was no room for violence. It was an inviolable rule. In her mind, Mabel saw her father at his typewriter, diligently reporting on some new struggle or cause. She saw her mother standing up to her own family, turning her back on an easy life of wealth in order to marry a penniless Jewish socialist. They were principled, her parents. They’d be horrified to know where she was, who she had become, what she was thinking of doing. But she was not part of their generation. She had come to see that their ways were antiquated. What had their methods gotten anyone? Not enough. Twelve dead children, burned to bones, lying on a field in New Jersey because of one man’s greed. Her parents were wrong. There were no rules anymore. You had to fight fire with fire.
Mabel joined hands with the others.
THE EXCEPTIONAL AMERICAN
In the days before the opening of Jake Marlowe’s Future of America Exhibition, New York had the feel of a giant carnival. The days were warmer. The rains that started the month had now given way to late-April sunshine. Beauty parlors were packed with girls having fresh marcel waves put into their hair. Store windows advertised SMART SUITS AND HATS FOR THE MAN WITHOUT LIMIT, THE MAN LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE OF AMERICA! The mood was optimistic. No one gave a damn about ghosts. It was as if overnight, everyone had agreed that what had come before was nothing but a bad dream best forgotten.
“All anybody wants to talk about is this exhibit,” Woody explained to Evie over pie at the Automat when she’d begged him to write another story about the Diviners. “Sorry, Sheba. But that’s the truth of it. I couldn’t get you an inch of column space. The ghost craze is over. Diviners are on their way out, like yesterday’s dance sensation.”
“But it isn’t a craze!” Evie insisted. “There is real evil at work, Woody.”
He shrugged. “Not when Jake Marlowe makes folks feel good about being American, like they can’t lose.”
The phone had stopped ringing at Diviners Investigations. Evie had taken to scouring the papers for any mention of a sighting. “Just like Will,” she chided herself. The only ghosts they’d hunted down, near a slip in the seaport, had taunted them openly. “Do you think you can stop this? You’ll never best him.” And just before they annihilated the wraith, sending its atoms who-knew-where, it had fixed them with a stare: “This is the history: blood.” When the exhilaration of the kill had fled them, they collapsed, skin crawling, stomachs aching as if they might retch. They were exhausted. And no closer to finding Conor.
Evie had heard nothing from Jericho since the awful weekend at Hopeful Harbor. She supposed that was as it should be—she needed time to sort through her messy, conflicting feelings. But she was sad to have lost their friendship. Mabel wasn’t returning her calls, either. “Sorry, I’m just awfully busy,” Mabel had said the one time Evie had managed to catch her at home. She’d sounded strange, though—evasive. And E
With only two days to go before the exhibition’s opening, WGI was hosting a celebration for Jake Marlowe at a swanky hotel near the New York Stock Exchange and broadcasting it on air live. Will Rogers would perform. So would W. C. Fields, Fanny Brice, and rising star Theta Knight. And there would be an interview with Sarah Snow and Evie O’Neill—the Divine and the Diviner.
At the sound of applause, Theta elbowed Evie. “Here comes your competition.” She nodded toward Sarah Snow, who was gliding through the ballroom in her signature white—a long satin dress for the occasion and a fresh white corsage nestled against ropes and ropes of pearls, which Evie was sure had not been provided by Jesus. Sarah waved, and then she joined Jake Marlowe, gazing up at him with beaming adoration.
“She’s laying it on a bit thick, isn’t she?” Evie grumbled.
Theta adjusted Evie’s rhinestone headband atop her freshly styled bob. “Listen, kid, you got one mission: Get out there and sparkle for WGI so that old buzzard, Mr. Phillips, and everybody else in here thinks you’re the cat’s pajamas. You’re gonna have to watch that tongue of yours. Can you manage it for one night?”
Evie pasted on a big smile. She batted her lashes like a deranged ingenue. “Look at me! Aren’t I just the dahhhlingest? I only talk about the weathahhhh and the goodness of people’s heahhhts.”
Theta smirked. “Get it all out now, Evil, before you step up to that microphone.”
Evie scowled. “There isn’t even any hooch!”
Theta gave Evie a gentle push toward the room. “Go be charming.”
The hotel’s ballroom swirled with Important People: congressmen, the mayor, radio and motion picture stars. Everyone had turned out for Jake Marlowe’s big gala. The theme was “The Exceptional American.” Everything had been draped in red, white, and blue crepe. Wearing an angelic expression, Sarah Snow moved from table to table, shaking hands with the fawning wives of men who were also working the room, doing whatever took them to the top. The joint smelled of perfume, steak, cigar smoke, desperation, and ambition. Evie wanted to be as far from Sarah as she could get. She headed for the other side of the room.