The City Beautiful: Chapter 40–Epilogue

“Thank you,” he muttered, holding his hand against his shirt to staunch the blood.

“Miss Ackermann, I am appalled by your audacity to lie to me,” Mrs. Brenner said, then clicked her tongue at Frankie.

From what you’ve told me, it’s clear that Yakov was searching for someone from his past, so if we methodically go through every memory, there might be a clue.

“A Russian pogromist in Chicago,” Raizel said sardonically. “That won’t be hard to find at all.”

The hospital ward had dissipated like smoke into that desolate stretch of earth, surrounded by shadowed structures.

Dressed in shabby pants, with sweat already leaching through the armpits of my white cotton shirt, I felt out of place amid the neighborhood’s neatly manicured lawns and lavish estates.

“Stealing. Conniving. Sabotaging me.”

“Such a filthy mouth,” Frankie said, and though he kept his voice tame and cold, anger flared in his gaze. “I’d have no qualms with breaking it. Understand, bigot?”

When Frankie returned his foot to Whitby’s chest, the man glowered at him with petulant rage, his monocle dangling down his bruised cheek.

“We’re looking for your business partner,” I said to Whitby, the English awkward and unwieldy on my tongue.

Wherever the show goes, he goes, too, to root out the infestation in your hovels and your ghettos. Culling, he calls it.

Wherever the show goes, he goes, too, to root out the infestation in your hovels and your ghettos. Culling, he calls it.

But the bravado had evaporated from Whitby’s voice.

“No,” I admitted, grimacing as the coach careened around a corner so sharply, I expected us to crash.

They called out to each other in a flowing, sibilant tongue.

The two leaped and twirled around each other in fervent circles, every so often drawing close to exchange blows, like two hawks locked in a fatal spiral of courtship.

The younger of the pair, a teen whose lambskin hat shielded eyes as dark and riveting as jet, was clearly the more talented swordsman. But his smooth, graceful parries were met with fierce tenacity from his partner—the other man, at least six centimeters taller, put all his strength behind his blows, as though this weren’t a performance at all.

His interference did little to quell the rage burning in my veins.

Through the encroaching darkness, I saw a rider approach on horseback.

She balked at my questions. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is.”

My frantic search uncovered a plethora of random objects—clothing, shoe brushes, buttonhooks, photographs of wives and sweethearts, tins of wax and pastes—things that seemed so ordinary, so human.

The fifth trunk belonged to someone named Grigori Antonovich and yielded more of the same ordinary trappings.

“I have no animosity toward your people. I think we’re more similar than you realize.”

As I hurried down the verdant walkways and pastoral gardens of the midway, I saw it through his eyes.

My rage and indignation were the same now as they had been then: how could I refute my role in a crime that had happened nearly 1900 years before I was born, if it had even happened at all?

“Twelve years ago, on a cold March morning, a bomb went off when he was escorting the tsar to the Winter Palace. My brother was crippled. His leg was gone. Turned into mincemeat. All because you reprehensible Jews got it in your mind to kill the tsar.”

There was one of your temples there, an eyesore of rotten wood, stacked haphazardly, without taste or culture.

“And that was when it came to me like a beautiful revelation. It was an epiphany. At that moment, looking into his eyes, I knew my purpose in life. My destiny. To rid the world of you. To become God’s flaming sword.”

A cold draft buffeted against my chest, and the shadows resolved into the silhouettes of many wings.

Ahead, the ship’s prow jutted into the fogbank.

A small crowd had gathered near the low railing, surrounding a swathed form.

As I stumbled down the stairs, I had the disconcerting impression that I was entering the bowels of the earth.

He held a pair of tortoiseshell lorgnette glasses to his eyes, to get a better look at the flames climbing the building’s walls.

The crowd parted to make way for a group of firefighters, their bronze helmets glinting like the regalia of knights.

I stopped as we reached an isolated alcove at the far side of the building, well away from the crowd that had gathered to watch the smoke rising.

I knew that to Grigori, what had resembled a blight had probably been a modest building from the outside, so as to avoid making a target of itself.

The same indifferent system that had allowed Grigori to kill with impunity had made it so he died anonymously.

Fireflies darted through the sultry orchid twilight. The humid breeze carried the honeyed fragrance of late-blooming alyssum, an aroma that muddled my senses almost as much as Frankie’s herbal cologne.

The drifting steamboats resembled primordial creatures that the winter chill had lured to the surface.

Silver threaded the coils of hair escaping from my mother’s headscarf, and her face was more gaunt than I remembered it, but I recognized her in an instant.