Philadelphia, March 1918 (Ch2)

Just a girl strolling with her suitcase which just happens to have a bomb inside...

Read Chapter 1 here:

Flamethrower, Interrupted

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There are two ways I can die today. I choose neither.

Theda Evora walked toward Philadelphia’s City Hall, silently counting each step. Seventy-five, seventy-six…She avoided collisions with faster walkers, ducked compliments from older men who tipped their bowlers and offered curt head shakes to ward off the food vendors. Heel, toe, heel, toe… The urge to hurry grew strong but she fought it by imagining balancing unbroken eggs on her shoes. If anyone hits into me and I spill this suitcase, I’ll be scrambled eggs. With nothing more to worry about.

She reached the great archway leading into the building and veered slightly to the left, stopping in the crevice between two pillars. She shuffled backward until her back gently touched the cold stone and exhaled, every nerve ending in her hands buzzing. The early March lions whipped the smells of horseshit and garbage into stinging dust devils, but she stood perfectly still.  Her free hand pulled the torn black hat with the ratty turkey feather applique over her eyes, hiding all but the line of people bustling past. Avoiding recognition was paramount, but so was looking as unfriendly as possible to parry all human contact. Her shabby dress, hem hanging and worn gray coat covered with dirt gave her the appearance of one of the day laborers, hall maids and back kitchen dishwashers come to work.

Maxim emerged from a sea of grey outerwear, his own crow-black coat without a speck of lint, tar-pitch bowler pulled low. His sparrow-quick eyes darted around the crowd, assessing each individual as either threatening or benign. Don’t see me, she pleaded as his head turned. But it was the prayer of a child, one last futile plea before events became unstoppable. He spotted her and began a slow amble forward, exaggerating his limp. The morning crowd rushed around him like river currents, courteously sidestepping to avoid him. This was an old tactic, turning the injury he had gotten from a police baton smashed into his ankle into an advantage. Everything can be made to work for you instead of against you, he would say to her during one of his many teaching sessions. Your enemies want to hurt you. Turn that hurt into your armor, your sword. Your gun.

            “My lovely Dora. Are you ready?” Maxim always spoke in soft tones, his rich Russian accent invoked memories of a snowcapped church in Saint Petersburg and parlors with velvet furniture and whale-oil lamps casting light to small tables. He smiled at his poor girl from the docks of Philadelphia, one determined to fight for worker’s rights and to die for them if called upon. He would never have guessed that she had seen those snowcapped spirals in Saint Petersburg herself on her family’s last European tour before the war.

She forced a smile. “Yes. But you need to leave. Now.”

His expression fell. “What is this?”

“Three policemen spotted you.”

“Impossible. I saw…”

“You didn’t see them. I did.” She mimicked his own strong but quiet delivery. She pulled her left hand from her pocket and handed him a watch. It was a Patek Phillipe. Her father’s parents had presented it to him on the day of his graduation from medical school, but it had fallen out of fashion and therefore had been forgotten in a drawer long ago.

“Got this yesterday outside Wannamakers. Pawn it fast. It’s worth hundreds.”

“That will take too much time. Alexander is ready with the car.”

“Make him wait,” she held out the watch. Take it. By God, take it or else this all goes south.

 “I don’t like this. We were supposed to do this together.”

“Plans change.”

He slowly reached over and plucked the watch, briefly wrapping his fingers around her hand. It took the remainder of her control not to pull away.

She nodded. “Go now. Listen for the fireworks.”

He smiled again. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” It felt as if another person spoke, a stranger, one rapidly dying inside her.

He turned and wove into the crowd. Anyone who noticed him earlier would have marveled at the spontaneous healing of the smallish, handsome young man with the unfortunate limp. Theda watched until he was out of sight, heading in the direction of the pawn shop.

The clock tower chimed for the half hour. It was eight-thirty on a Monday morning.

Theda stepped away from the wall, leaving the alcove. She wasn’t worried about anyone from their anarchist crew seeing her. They were scattered throughout the city cleverly working their day jobs so a record of their whereabouts was solid. During the short exchange with Maxim, the crowd thinned as City Hall, the banks and the various office buildings absorbed their employees.

She closed her eyes and took one last breath, forcing her feet into the previous delicate walking pattern. She moved through the archway and hung a sharp left to the other side of the wall where she had been leaning. This, too, was a breach of the plan. She had been instructed to leave the suitcase in the middle of the entranceway to City Hall. She gently set the suitcase down. From the same pocket that had held the watch, she pulled a large paper tag with a string. Her hands shook as she attached the tag to the suitcase handle. She stepped away and turned on one heel, resisting the urge to run and walked, this time with no counting or imaginary eggs, in the opposite direction of Maxim and the getaway car.

In her wake, the breeze from her departure flipped the tag around to its written side:

DO NOT OPEN! BOMB INSIDE!

After some blocks the streets changed as houses, apartment buildings and small businesses formed the neighborhoods. She ducked into a deserted side alley that backed a cobbler’s shop, scattering rats and yellowed newspapers among the scents of tanning chemicals and leather. She squeezed behind a stack of dirty wooden crates and pulled a large paper bag from the corner. She unbuttoned the battered coat, popping off several buttons that had been hanging by threads, and threw it behind a pile of trash. Balancing on one foot, she flipped off the worn boot and smashed her foot into her high heeled burgundy shoes. The ill-hemmed skirt was the next to go. Once it was off she pulled down her dress that had been hidden up inside her dark red velvet coat, so dark it was almost black.

“Good riddance,” she muttered to the turkey feather hat. The mere sight of it turned her empty, sour stomach. It was the first item she had acquired to form this alternate personality. A symbol of her foolishness. From the bag she took the last item, which was a deep red cloche hat with exquisitely crafted roses gathered over one ear.

She regained her composure as she slipped on her leather gloves, raising her chin and squaring her shoulders. When she emerged from the alley, she was Theda Evora. The girl known as Dora Rosini was gone forever.

Theda couldn't resist a backward glance. She had purposefully sent Maxim in the complete opposite direction and it would take him a while to haggle with the pawn shop owner, but fear began to overtake her relief. She didn’t fear for City Hall. Someone would see the tag and soon all hell would break loose there, but not the hell that the anarchists wanted to unleash. I’m a marked woman now. Strange. Then the severity fell on her like a brick. If she ever met any of them again, much less Maxim, she was a dead woman.

It’s over. By this afternoon, she’d be gone. On a train heading to Fort Riley in Kansas with her mother and sister to see her father, Dr. Harold Evora. That was good. That had promise. Her father was her north star. She would go to him and begin the process of righting her life and closing this silly chapter, an act of rebellion that started with good intentions and turned quickly to madness. She was three blocks from home when she began to smile.

But then she saw it. She stopped in her tracks and scrambled into an apartment building doorway. The fear came slamming back into her chest and she had trouble catching her breath.

For the past two weeks, everywhere she turned was a yellow car, a make that she had never seen before. Cruising past her house. On the street by her father’s office. And if it weren’t the car she saw, it was the driver. He was a man with white hair, and not that of the elderly, but completely absent of color as if his strands had never held any other pigment. He sneaked about in her wake, reading a newspaper or pretending to purchase an item if she were in a store. And he wore the oddest combination of clothing. His overcoat was longer than the current style and constructed of a shiny, slippery material. Worse, covering his carefully combed snow-white head was an ill-fitting boater hat. No one wore them before the trees bloomed. He was not a cop. She was sure of that. No cop would go undercover in such an outfit.

The car cruised down the street and turned the corner, heading away from her home. Did he see me? She was afraid of him. She doubled back to the direction of City Hall, slipping into alleyways that she knew connected streets, making her way home in a crazy cross pattern. Go as the crow flies. Please, just let me make it to that train. Please. I’ll be good from now on.

The man with the white hair was too obvious to be a cop. He wasn’t one of the anarchists, either. That car was a beauty. And new. The anarchists didn’t have a pot to piss in. She didn’t know his identity, but if she left for long enough, God willing she would never find out.

Her haphazard route home worked, and soon she was through the front door of the pleasant Victorian home, its twin hundred-year-old crabapple trees just showing light green shoots before the deep pink blooms that would fill the house with their wonderful scent. She would miss their blooming this year, but that was fine. She hid behind heavy drapes in the front parlor and peeked out the window, but the yellow car was nowhere in sight.

Theda had been many things in that past year. An expelled student, an anarchist, and a society dame, as the dockworkers catcalled. Those pieces of herself, like shards of glass that broke and were reassembled with the high heat of a glass blower’s torch, created and recreated a person who fit in everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. There was one thing, though, of which she was certain.

Theda Evora was no damn murderer.

For this she would certainly be killed. But they had to find her first.

READ CHAPTER 3 HERE:

The Winter Wasp