I was surprised to find he spoke with a New York accent. I didn’t like to admit that I was there alone. “I’m supposed to be meeting some friends,” I said, “but I don’t know how I’m going to find them in this crowd.”

“I get a break in a few minutes,” he said. “Stay around and I’ll buy you a soda.”

“All right.”

This was working wonderfully—maybe too well to be true. Daniel had told me over and over that a good detective never goes anywhere alone and never without telling someone where he is going. I, with a detective agency of one, had to work alone all the time and consequently had gotten myself into too many difficult situations—including one in this very place. But I couldn’t pass up a chance to interview someone who had appeared on the scene right before Houdini’s act went wrong, and a soda fountain, in the middle of a crowd could hardly be classed as dangerous, could it?

I waited out of the sun beside a shooting gallery, watching young men trying their hardest to impress their lady friends by shooting down a row of ducks. The crowd surged past me—working girls from the factories, courting couples, families with excited children—all making the most of a day out of the heat and oppression of the city. But the waiting also gave me time to think. My own memories of this place were so tinged with horror and regret that I began to wish I had never come here. In fact I was just deciding that I was acting stupidly and should go home when Abdullah appeared from the Cairo Pavilion and came to join me.

“So your name is Molly, is it?” he said as we walked down the Bowery together. “I heard the announcer say it.”

“That’s right. And is yours really Abdullah?”

He laughed. “That’s just for this act. It’s really Mike. I’m Irish like you. My parents came over in the great famine.”

“Irish?” I looked at his bronzed torso, then I noticed that his eyes were that alarming blue of the so-called Black Irish, just like Daniel’s, in fact.

He laughed again. “You’d be surprised what a little walnut juice will do and I usually spend my spare time sunning myself on the beach, to keep up appearances.”

“So what are you doing still working here?” I asked. “I thought you’d have left this place when you were hired by a real vaudeville house. Surely that was a lucky break for you, wasn’t it?”