As soon as we’re on the other side, I yank my arm away. “Have you lost your mind?”
“What?” He looks like he hasn’t the slightest idea what I mean, until I shoot a pointed glance toward the street.
“Waiting politely won’t get you across the street in Boston,” he informs me, “at least not in 1905. There aren’t any of those blinking idiot signs that show a hand and count down the seconds for you.”
“I like the idiot signs,” I mutter. “Your method seems more likely to get me killed.”
Lock Sen Low is apparently on the second floor, but there’s a cart just inside the stairwell. A young Chinese guy opens the lid of the large bamboo steam tray, and Kiernan points to a plain white bun and then to one scattered with black sesame seeds.
Kiernan hands the sesame bun to me. It’s huge. “I thought these were for you. I’m really not that hungry.” While I’d have sworn that was true, my tummy picks that precise moment to contradict me with a growl, possibly because the bao really does smell delicious.
I would also have sworn the street was far too noisy for Kiernan to have heard that small noise, but either he’s got excellent hearing or my glance downward at my traitorous stomach tipped him off.
“Sorry, but I think you’ve been outvoted,” he says, taking a big chomp out of his bun, which smells like barbecue pork. “Just take a bite. I’ll finish what you don’t want.”
It tastes even better than it smells. We walk as we eat, thankfully avoiding any more near collisions. Kiernan polishes off the pork bao while I still have a good half-dozen bites left, and I hand him the rest of mine, even though I could definitely have finished it. Maybe a bit of deprivation will teach my stomach who’s boss.
Boston Commons is only a few blocks over, and we catch the train just this side of the park. Once we’re on board, I clear my throat, giving Kiernan an impatient look.
“What?”
“We’re now on the train,” I say. “You owe me information.”
He nods and begins to rummage around in his canvas bag, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper. I smooth it out as best I can and see that it is a flyer. See the Amazing Boudini, Now Disappearing Nightly at the Great Steel Theater. The words are in the foreground in green, printed over the black silhouette of a top hat.
“The poster is nice—” I begin.
“Thank you. I thought it turned out rather well myself.”
“But Boudini? You can’t be serious?”
“The name wasn’t my idea.” He lowers his voice and leans in so that we’re not overheard. I follow his lead, although I doubt anyone could make heads or tails of this conversation if they did catch a few snippets. “That part is historical. Apparently some other guy pulled this same stunt or, rather, will pull it this coming September, calling himself Boudini. Houdini finds out and gets all pissed off. Or we think he does. It might have been a publicity stunt Houdini was in on from the beginning. Either way, he challenges the guy to an underwater competition, which Houdini, of course, wins. The other guy nearly drowned, or at least that’s what the newspaper says.”
“What’s this other fake Houdini going to think about you stealing his plan?”
He shrugs. “Don’t care. Kate tried to get past Houdini’s bodyguards in London to ask about the key, but she failed. This was Plan B—get Houdini angry enough to come here and challenge me. Then we confront him, and he hands over his key.”
“Which he’s going to do willingly?”
“Maybe. He’s supposed to be a nice enough guy. He’s not a fan of people who try to manipulate others through bogus claims about the spirit world, so maybe we can convince him. But willingly or not, we’ll have to get his key.”
He’s right, although I have the feeling this isn’t going to be as easy as he thinks. “So . . . where did you learn to do magic?”
“I picked up the basics watching street magicians that year at the Expo. You watch long enough and you can tell what they’re doing. And a guy over on Cairo Street taught me a few tricks. I’m not really good with the showman side, but I can still do enough to prime the audience for the main event.”
“I’m guessing that’s an escape trick?”
“Yep. The assistants put cuffs on me, and I hop into the container. When they open it up a few minutes later, I’m uncuffed and unchained. Ta-da. As long as I can reach the CHRONOS key, it’s easy as pie.”
“So who unlocks the cuffs?”
He looks down at the floor. “Um, Jess did, the first few times. But I don’t like pulling him into this. I’ve just been doing it myself, back at the apartment.”
“That’s . . . not a good idea, is it? I mean, from what you’ve told me . . . from what Katherine’s told me—”
“It’s not ideal, but I can handle it. I don’t say anything to myself, and I schedule all the jumps for the week on my day off, at a time when I’m half-asleep.” He shrugs. “It takes a little longer to get the cuffs off when I’m groggy, but it’s not bad if I go right back to sleep. Kind of like it was a dream.”
“No. I’ll do it. What time did we leave your place this morning? A little after ten?”
“Sounds about right.”
“When you do the trick today, set the coordinates for your place at 10:15 a.m., and I’ll be there. Then do it for 10:16 for the next jump, and a minute or so later for each of the others. We’ll get a week out of the way before I go. It will only take a little of my time, and it would be nice if you came out of this with your marbles intact, too.”
His expression is a combination of reluctance and relief, so it must be a bigger deal than he’s letting on.
We switch trains at Lake Street, boarding an open trolley that Kiernan says will take us out into the suburbs. I spend most of the ride looking at the scenery and thumbing through a day-old Boston Globe that someone stuffed between the benches.
Kiernan reads over my shoulder, and when I flip the paper around to the back, he points to an advertisement for Keith’s Vaudeville House.
“Lambert and Pierce. They’ll start at Norumbega next week.”
“Two Men in Black?” For me that pulls up a visual of Will Smith and that other guy in dark sunglasses fighting intergalactic troublemakers.
“Yeah, Kate got a kick out of that, too. It’s a minstrel show—they should call it Two Men in Blackface. Like a lot of acts, they run a circuit of vaudeville houses within a few hundred miles. Some headliners travel the entire country, even around the world.”
“So is that your goal, O Great Boudini? Bump Houdini out of the limelight and take it for yourself?”
“Dear God, no. Not my goal and not even a remote possibility. Houdini actually has some escape-artist skills, and he’s a master showman. It’s not just the CHRONOS key. I’m lucky to keep them awake until I do the vanish.”
“Do you think there’s any chance he’ll be here today?”
“Houdini? No. I’m pretty sure I’ll get a letter from his attorneys before the great man himself comes all the way to Boston. Like I said, this is just prep, so we could have ski—”
“No. We couldn’t have. I could’ve read for weeks and never have gotten as much information about 1905 as I have in the past hour.”
He chuckles. “Careful, love. You’re starting to sound like a true CHRONOS historian.”
I shake my head. “Not CHRONOS. Just the cleanup crew.”
Kiernan’s description of Norumbega as a poor man’s World’s Fair is dead-on. There’s a huge fountain near the center of the park that looks like the electric fountains at the Expo, scaled down and heavily speckled with bird droppings. A carousel sits near the center of the park, and Kiernan says they’re planning to add a Ferris wheel and other rides. The Charles River is a much smaller stand-in for the shores of Lake Michigan.
The main attraction at Norumbega seems to be canoeing. There are so many canoes on the river that I can barely see the water.