Shadow did not know what to say. He said, “So where are you calling from?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good hearted. Not bright, but he’d give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of a way is that for a god to die?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t give two fucking cents, son. He was a whole lot like you. Big and dumb.” Wednesday stopped talking. He coughed.
“What’s wrong?” said Shadow, for the second time.
“They got in touch.”
“Who did?”
“The opposition.”
“And?”
“They want to discuss a truce. Peace talks. Live and let fucking live.”
“So what happens now?”
“Now I go and drink bad coffee with the modern assholes in a Kansas City Masonic hall.”
“Okay. You going to pick me up, or shall I meet you somewhere?”
“You stay there and you keep your head down. Don’t get into any trouble. You hear me?”
“But—”
There was a click, and the line went dead and stayed dead. There was no dial tone, but then, there never was.
Nothing but time to kill. The conversation with Wednesday had left Shadow with a sense of disquiet. He got up, intending to go for a walk, but already the light was fading, and he sat back down again.
Shadow picked up the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872–1884 and turned the pages, his eyes scanning the tiny print, not actually reading it, occasionally scanning something that caught his eye.
In July of 1874, Shadow learned, the city council was concerned about the number of itinerant foreign loggers arriving in the town. An opera house was to be built on the corner of Third Street and Broadway. It was to be expected that the nuisances attendant to the damming of Mill Creek would abate once the mill-pond had become a lake. The council authorized the payment of seventy dollars to Mr. Samuel Samuels, and of eighty-five dollars to Mr. Heikki Salminen, in compensation for their land and for the expenses incurred in moving their domiciles out of the area to be flooded.
It had never occurred to Shadow before that the lake was man-made. Why call a town Lakeside, when the lake had begun as a dammed mill-pond? He read on, to discover that a Mr. Hinzelmann, originally of Hüdemuhlen in Brunswick, was in charge of the lake-building project, and that the city council had granted him the sum of $370 toward the project, any shortfall to be made up by public subscription. Shadow tore off a strip of a paper towel and placed it into the book as a bookmark. He could imagine Hinzelmann’s pleasure in seeing the reference to his grandfather. He wondered if the old man knew that his family had been instrumental in building the lake. Shadow flipped forward through the book, scanning for more references to the lake-building project.
They had dedicated the lake in a ceremony in the spring of 1876, as a precursor to the town’s centennial celebrations. A vote of thanks to Mr. Hinzelmann was taken by the council.
Shadow checked his watch. It was five thirty. He went into the bathroom, shaved, combed his hair. He changed his clothes. Somehow the final fifteen minutes passed. He got the wine and the plant, and he walked next door.
The door opened as he knocked. Marguerite Olsen looked almost as nervous as he felt. She took the wine bottle and the potted plant, and said thank you. The television was on, The Wizard of Oz on video. It was still in sepia, and Dorothy was still in Kansas, sitting with her eyes closed in Professor Marvel’s wagon as the old fraud pretended to read her mind, and the twister-wind that would tear her away from her life was approaching. Leon sat in front of the screen, playing with a toy fire truck. When he saw Shadow an expression of delight touched his face; he stood up and ran, tripping over his feet in his excitement, into a back bedroom, from which he emerged a moment later, triumphantly waving a quarter.
“Watch, Mike Ainsel!” he shouted. Then he closed both his hands and he pretended to take the coin into his right hand, which he opened wide. “I made it disappear, Mike Ainsel!”
“You did,” agreed Shadow. “After we’ve eaten, if it’s okay with your mom, I’ll show you how to do it even smoother than that.”
“Do it now if you want,” said Marguerite. “We’re still waiting for Samantha. I sent her out for sour cream. I don’t know what’s taking her so long.”
And, as if that was her cue, footsteps sounded on the wooden deck, and somebody shouldered open the front door. Shadow did not recognize her at first, then she said, “I didn’t know if you wanted the kind with calories or the kind that tastes like wallpaper paste so I went for the kind with calories,” and he knew her then: the girl from the road to Cairo.
“That’s fine,” said Marguerite. “Sam, this is my neighbor, Mike Ainsel. Mike, this is Samantha Black Crow, my sister.”
I don’t know you, thought Shadow desperately. You’ve never met me before. We’re total strangers. He tried to remember how he had thought snow, how easy and light that had been: this was desperate. He put out his hand and said, “Pleased to meetcha.”
She blinked, looked up at his face. A moment of puzzlement, then recognition entered her eyes and curved the corners of her mouth into a grin. “Hello,” she said.
“I’ll see how the food is doing,” said Marguerite, in the taut voice of someone who burns things in kitchens if they leave them alone and unwatched even for a moment.
Sam took off her puffy coat and her hat. “So you’re the melancholy but mysterious neighbor,” she said. “Who’da thunk it?” She kept her voice down.
“And you,” he said, “are girl Sam. Can we talk about this later?”
“If you promise to tell me what’s going on.”
“Deal.”
Leon tugged at the leg of Shadow’s pants. “Will you show me now?” he asked, and held out his quarter.
“Okay,” said Shadow. “But if I show you, you have to remember that a master magician never tells anyone how it’s done.”
“I promise,” said Leon, gravely.
Shadow took the coin in his left hand, then moved Leon’s right hand in, cupping it in his own hand, huge by comparison, showing him how to appear to take the coin in his right hand while actually leaving it in Shadow’s left hand. Then he put the coin into Leon’s left hand and made him repeat the movements on his own.
After several attempts the boy mastered the move. “Now you know half of it,” said Shadow. “Because the moves are only half of it. The other half is this: put your attention on the place where the coin ought to be. Look at the place it’s meant to be. Follow it with your eyes. If you act like it’s in your right hand, no one will even look at your left hand, no matter how clumsy you are.”
Sam watched all this with her head tipped slightly on one side, saying nothing.
“Dinner!” called Marguerite, pushing her way in from the kitchen with a steaming bowl of spaghetti in her hands. “Leon, go wash your hands.”
The food was good: crusty garlic bread, thick red sauce, good spicy meatballs. Shadow complimented Marguerite on it.