Barnes smiled at him, and made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger. “I like how you think. You’ve got what it takes.”

Leland whistled halfway back to Crescent City, interviewing himself as he drove. “Did you know, on that day, how your bright future awaited you?”

“I did.” Then he reconsidered. “No, of course not.” But he reconsidered again, and answered, cheerfully, “Oh, of course I knew. The moment I saw that eight of diamonds, and can you believe it was just an eight of diamonds he handed me? I would have to be quite an idiot to trust that, you know.” But this line of thought led him to furrow his brow and consider the road more carefully, so he instead went toward the lighthearted, the personal checklists. “Your religion?”

“Gin and tonic.”

“Your favorite music?”

“Gin and tonic.”

He would be excellent at answering questions.

A week later, there had been no news, but still Leland whistled happily while rowing to the station, or puttering in the engineering room. When people came by and poked their heads in to see what he was doing, it was as if he’d been caught eating cookies. His face went slate-stoic, he became polite, he was unreadable. He considered changing his name to Jackson Wheeler, in case Southern gothics were going to be big again. He wondered, as his cowboy photograph gazed back at him, whether he should begin to answer to the nickname “Jangles.”

3

There were two impediments to Leland’s plans for becoming a famous motion-picture actor.

First was his location. No matter how enthusiastic studios might be about his twenty seconds of screen test, it was possible that there were men of abilities greater than his, men found only minutes from Famous Players’ front gates. The more he considered it, the more it made his stomach hurt. He began to plot his escape from the lighthouse.

There was a second concern, in that the United States declared war on Germany.

For several weeks, there were excited feelings about the war, but then it occurred to the people of Crescent City and its surrounding areas—and in fact the whole country—that someone would be called on to fight it. Naturally, thoughts of the Lusitania made the blood boil, but so did the idea of the federal government’s demanding the able bodies of America’s sons. Even the government itself wasn’t quite sure how to coax ten million boys into uniform without causing, as it had during the Civil War, riots in the streets.

The solution came from Enoch Crowder, a vicious Washington, D.C., bureaucrat, a cynical bachelor who hated work, a man whose morning constitutional involved a brief walk in the park, where he would beat a baseball bat against a tree and scream as loudly as he could.