“I built it.”
“What?” She playfully pushes him. “I don’t believe you. That’s my favorite building in New York!”
She’s already said this about Grand Central, but luckily, Starkweather is too blotto to notice.
“I did. I’ll show you.” Starkweather stumbles and grunts as he looks through roll after roll of blueprints. “Ah!” he says at last. He smears open the tube of paper. “Here we go. The Potter Building. An iron-framed beauty, she is!”
Kiyoko beams. “Wow. I can’t believe I’ve met the architect of the Potter Building!”
Starkweather hiccups. “In the flesh! Let me get you girls another drink.”
He turns, and Kiyoko eyes me hard and tips her head at me.Cram that in your skirts, her look says.
But I’m a bit drunk. “What?” I whisper.
Kiyoko points hard at the papers. I finally understand:The blueprints! Steal the blueprints!
I snatch up the blueprints, roll them, fold them, squash them, crumple them. It’s not easy, cramming a tube of paper into one’s stockings without being blatantly obvious about the whole thing. Oh, and while drunk.
Starkweather starts to turn toward me with an amber-filled glass, so Kiyoko grabs him by the elbow and leads him to the window. He gives her a whiskey and they clink glasses.
Kiyoko points out the window and says, “Don’t you just love this city?”
“Yeah,” Starkweather belches. He places a hand around Kiyoko’s waist.
She deftly moves it away.
“I love this city, and I love its ladies,” Starkweather says, the words sloshing over one another. He places a hand on Kiyoko’s hind end. She grasps it and lifts it off her person.
Kiyoko glances back at me. I am still smoothing my skirts over what is likely a terribly obvious lump in my stockings. I hiccup.
Kiyoko assesses the room and I follow her gaze—windows, doors, hallway…
She works her jaw.
She holds up the palm of her right hand and taps it with her left pointer finger.
“Look right here,” she says to Starkweather.
He sways but manages to focus on the palm of her hand…
… which whips forward and smacks Starkweather across the left jowl.
Starkweather stumbles and trips over a chair. “Urrgh!” He crashes to the floor.
Kiyoko grabs my wrist. “Time to go!”
“Get back here!” Starkweather bellows. He struggles to lift himself. He flops about like a fish on a dock.
Kiyoko pulls my drunken self into the hallway, through a doorway, and down six flights of winding stairs.
We pass the guard and Kiyoko yells, “Lovely time! Lovely!”
We rush out the door, onto the sidewalk, past Trinity Church and its intricate, Gothic headstones. We dash north for dozens of blocks to the headquarters of Julia’s Bureau, my head spinny and giddy and whiskey-soaked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Pax sees me wobble through the door, and he smiles, but his forehead is wrinkled, and I’m so confused: Is that concern? Relief? Happiness?
