Curious Toys

by Elizabeth Hand

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Historical Mysteries; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

An intrepid young woman stalks a murderer through turn-of-the-century Chicago in "this rich, spooky, and atmospheric thriller that will appeal to fans of Henry Darger and Erik Larson alike" (Sarah McCarry).

In the sweltering summer of 1915, Pin, the 14-year-old daughter of a carnival fortune-teller, dresses as a boy and joins a teenage gang that roams the famous Riverview amusement park, looking for trouble.

Unbeknownst to the well-heeled city-dwellers and visitors who come to enjoy the midway, the park is also host to a ruthless killer who uses the shadows of the dark carnival attractions to conduct his crimes. When Pin sees a man enter the Hell Gate ride with a young girl, and emerge alone, she knows that something horrific has occurred.

The crime will lead her to the iconic outsider artist Henry Darger, a brilliant but seemingly mad man. Together, the two navigate the seedy underbelly of a changing city to uncover a murderer few even know to look for.

Release date: September 29, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter 2

Riverview Amusement Park, Chicago, August 1915

THERE HE WAS again, smoking a cigar in front of the Infant Incubators. A white man not much taller than Pin—and she was small for her age and looked twelve, rather than fourteen—but too tall to be a midget. Something stealthy and twitchy about him: every few minutes, his head would twist violently and he’d punch the air, fending off an invisible assailant.

There was no attacker. Crowded as the amusement park was, Pin saw no one anywhere near him. The young mothers dragging their kids into the Infant Incubators building to escape the heat stepped off the sidewalk onto the Pike to avoid coming within two feet of him. He was a dingbat.

She ran her sweaty hands across her knickerbockers, removed her cap to fan her face. She’d seen the weird little man at the park often—three or four times a week he’d be standing near one of the rides, always watching, watching. He never seemed to change out of the same soiled work clothes. Trousers, shirt, a dark-blue canvas jacket. Heavy boots. A white boater hat with a stained red band; sometimes a bowler.

Today it was a boater. He never rode any of the rides, and never seemed to partake in any of the attractions. Once she’d seen him outside the Casino Restaurant, drinking a glass of beer and eating a sausage. A few times he’d been with another man, older, the two of them like Mutt and Jeff in the funnies: one tall and skinny, the other short with that grubby mustache and dinged-up boater.

But lately the weird little man was always alone. And all he ever seemed to do was watch the kids go in and out of the Infant Incubators, hop off and on the Velvet Coaster, clamber into the boats that bore them into Hell Gate or the Old Mill, then back out again.

He knew Pin was watching him. She could tell by the way his eyes slanted when he cocked his head, pretending to look in the other direction, the way Mr. Lerwin used to look at her younger sister, Abriana. But the dingbat wouldn’t know that Pin was a girl disguised as a boy. No one knew, except Pin and her mother.

He talked to himself, too. One of these days she’d sidle up close enough to hear what he was saying. But not this morning. She tugged her cap back down, felt in her pocket for the Helmar cigarette box Max had given her half an hour ago, along with a cuff to the back of her head.

“Don’t you go dragging your feet like last time,” he’d said. “I can’t afford to lose business.”

“It was raining. Lionel ain’t gonna ditch you.”

“It’s not raining today. Go.”

He raised his hand in warning. She darted out of the dressing room and heard him laughing behind her. “Run, rabbit, run!”

She spat on the pavement, kicking at a squashed stogie, spun on her heel, and headed for the exit gate. When she glanced back over her shoulder, the dingbatty little man was gone.

Chapter 3

MAX ALWAYS GAVE her fare to the movie studio or the other places where she delivered hashish cigarettes and dope, though only enough for one way. She never stopped asking him for the nickel, even though that risked getting smacked.

“What about the fare home?” She sat in his dressing room, a makeshift shack even smaller than the one where she lived with her mother, tossing her cap into the air as she watched him get ready for work. “Just another nickel, you got plenty.”

“The hell I do. Tell Lionel to give it to you. That’s his end of the deal, not mine.” Max leaned into his makeup mirror, drew a comma in black kohl along one eyelid. “You’re too lazy to work, boy, I’ll find someone else.”

Before she could duck, he grabbed the cap from her hand and tossed it toward the back of the room, where it fell beneath the cracked window. Pin retrieved the cap, then stepped to an overturned barrel that served as a chair. Scattered photographs lay atop it, old French postcards that showed the same young woman, dark haired and wearing a black schoolgirl’s uniform. Her waist was grotesquely small, tightly corseted beneath the uniform. Corsets were going out of fashion; these pictures had to be at least ten years old.

Looking at them made Pin feel slightly sick. The woman’s tiny waist made it look as though she’d been cut in two, the halves of her body held together by a strip of black ribbon: if you pulled at it, she’d fall apart. Pin quickly gathered the photos and shoved them onto a shelf covered with similar photographs, then settled on top of the barrel to gaze, mesmerized, over Max’s shoulder into the mirror.

She’d never known a guy who wore makeup. She’d heard of fairies, of course. Ikie and the other boys in the park sometimes pointed them out to her at night. To Pin, they looked like ordinary men. A few were dudes, flashy dressers who wore spats and striped waistcoats and nice shoes, but she’d seen plenty of dudes fondling women in the dark rides. Some fairies looked like workmen, others businessmen. Some might be with their wives, or even children.

“How can fairies have kids?” she’d asked Ikie.

He shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

Once in the Comique, the park’s movie arcade, she’d seen a pair of young men standing together in front of a Mutoscope, dressed like they were headed for a dance hall. The men took turns peering into the viewer, and for a fraction of a second their fingers had touched—deliberately, one finger caressing the other before the hand was withdrawn. The sight had filled her with an emotion she’d never felt before: a cold flash, neither dread nor fear yet partaking of both, along with a pulse of exhilaration, as though she sat in the first car of the Velvet Coaster as it began its plunge down the tracks.

Max wasn’t a dude, or a fairy, as far as Pin could tell. She followed him sometimes around the park, always careful to keep a safe distance, half hoping and half fearful that she might see some proof that he was…something. Some look or touch, a foray into the Fairyland woods and picnic ground, where men were rumored to meet.

She never did. Other than the occasional knock to the head, he never laid hands on her. Offstage he wore shirtsleeves, no cuffs or celluloid collar, and plain dark trousers, indifferently pressed. He had vivid yellow-green eyes, the color of uranium glass. He dyed his hair blond, but that was for the act, like the makeup he painstakingly applied before his first performance and touched up during the day.

His mustache, too, was fake, and only half a mustache. He was Max and Maxene, the She-Male, half man and half woman, appearing at irregular interludes in the last tent on the Pike, just past the Ten-in-One. Not a real freak, but a gaffed freak, like most of the others.

According to Clyde, the Negro magician, Max had been an actor before he arrived in Riverview early that summer. “He played Romeo at the Hudson Theatre. Shakespeare.”

“Romeo?”

Clyde had given her a sharp look. Pin thought he was handsome enough to be an actor himself—tall and broad chested, with beautiful chestnut-brown eyes. “You think it’s funny he played Romeo?”

She shrugged. “Sure. Look how old he is.”

“He was younger then. They said he was going to be the next Karl Nash.”

“Why’s he working here, then?”

Clyde shook his head. “What I heard, some little gal broke his heart. That’s the way it goes. He’s just doing this to get by. He’ll find work again when he wants to. Real work.”

Max used her to deliver drugs only a few times a week. Pin wished she had a more reliable source of cash. Like Louie, the kid who worked as a sniper, putting up signs around Chicago that advertised new shows at Riverview. He got three dollars a day for that, plus streetcar fare. Or the boys who worked as shills and made twenty-five cents an hour, winning big prizes in fixed carnival games while the rubes looked on. The rubes never won, and they never saw the boys slipping through the back doors of the concessions to return their prizes—child-sized dolls, five-cent John Ruskin cigars, glass tumblers.

And only boys were used to deliver drugs across town. Hashish and marihuana were considered poison, like arsenic. Heroin was worse—Pin had to get it illegally from a druggist on the North Side and bring the glass bottle back to Max, who measured the dope into tiny tinfoil packets, twenty for a quarter. Pin dreaded those trips, especially since two policewomen arrested a druggist on North Clark for selling heroin and cocaine to another delivery boy.

Max had a few regular clients—Lionel, a writer at the movie studio; a woman who performed abortions in Dogville; a Negro horn player who played jazz music at Colosimo’s Cafe, a black-and-tan joint, where black people and white people could dance together. The rest were onetime deliveries: students at the university, musicians, whores, vaudeville performers at the theaters along the Golden Mile. Her run to the Essanay Studios was Mondays and Fridays, usually. Lionel made good money, twenty dollars a story, and he pitched three or four scenarios a week.

She knew the work was risky, but it never felt dangerous. If she’d been a fourteen-year-old white girl roaming the South Side or Packingtown, sure. But no one blinked to see a white boy the same age sauntering along the Golden Mile, or ducking in and out of theaters, or Barney Grogan’s illegal saloon, hands in his pockets and a smart mouth on him if you looked at him sideways.

She seldom saw Max smoke hashish. Instead she watched in fascination as he applied his makeup. He made a paste from cold cream and talcum powder and used this to cover the left side of his face; then carefully mixed cigarette ash, pulverized charcoal, and dried ink to make kohl and mascara, which he applied with tiny brushes and a blunt pencil to his left eye.

“Why don’t you just buy ladies’ stuff?” she wondered aloud.

Max laughed. “What do you think they’d say to me in Marshall Field’s, I went in and asked for some face paint and rouge?”

“The actors at Essanay use makeup. Charlie Chaplin uses makeup. And Wallace Beery.”

“Do I look like Charlie Chaplin?”

After he’d painted his cheeks and lips, he dabbed the edge of one eyelid with adhesive, then affixed a fringe of false lashes made of curled black paper. Last of all, he put on a wig of blond curls. It was only half a wig, like his face was only half a woman’s. The right side had Max’s own bristly stubble on his chin and neck, a web of broken capillaries across his cheek. Blond hair slicked back so you could see where the orange dye had seeped into his scalp. Outside his tent, a banner depicted an idealized version of the real thing: the She-Male’s face split down the middle and body divided lengthwise—natty black suit and shiny shoes, yellow shirtwaist and hobble skirt, the hem hiked up to display a trim ankle.

“Gimme a match,” Max ordered. He tapped a cigarette from a box of Helmars, its logo depicting an Egyptian pharaoh. Pin lit the cigarette for him, and he turned away, leaving her to stare at her own face in the mirror, a luxury she didn’t have in her own shack. Snub nose and pointed chin, dirt smudged across one cheek, uptilted soot-brown eyes, a chipped front tooth where she’d gotten into a fight. A scrawny boy’s face, you’d never think otherwise.

“Look sharp.” Without turning, Max tossed her a Helmar cigarette box, barely giving her time to catch it before he threw her a nickel. She snatched it from the air and he laughed. “Nice catch, kid.”

She grinned at the compliment, pocketed the nickel, and headed out on her run.

Chapter 5

FRANCIS BACON REMOVED his helmet and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. The park had opened only an hour ago, and already it was so hot that several people had visited the infirmary complaining of heatstroke, and a kid had fainted outside the Ten-in-One. Served them right for coming out in this weather. If he didn’t have to report for work at the park’s station house, Francis would be down by the riverside or in a dim saloon, drinking a glass of beer.

In the grove behind him, a small crowd had gathered to wait for Riverview’s giant cuckoo clock to chime eleven. Francis replaced his handkerchief and helmet, withdrew his pocket watch, and counted the seconds until he heard a mechanical whirring, followed by cheers as the cuckoo clock’s automata emerged. They performed their hourly dance, bowing and twirling, a half-dozen brightly painted figures half as tall as he was, until the metal cuckoo bird emerged from a pair of doors and made its grating cry. Francis set his watch back in his pocket and headed toward a water fountain.

A line had formed, women mostly. Francis took his place behind them, doffing his helmet and stepping aside to let a young woman go in front of him.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, and smiled from beneath a stylish straw toque. Francis watched as she bent over the fountain, a spray of droplets spattering her white shirtwaist. No beauty, but she had a nice figure and wore the shorter skirts that were fashionable this summer, her ankles visible beneath the linen hem.

“You’re very welcome.” He smiled, winking, and she blushed before hurrying to join her friends. Maybe he could find her later in one of the beer gardens.

He stepped up to the fountain, drank, and returned to his rounds, watching for pickpockets, jackrollers, lost children. It was early for drunks, but sometimes you’d see someone who’d been up all night elsewhere and ridden the streetcar to Western Avenue in hopes of keeping the fun going. But mostly, he gave directions to the washrooms and water fountains.

Francis had been a real cop years before—detective sergeant at Robey Street station. That was before he got involved with the notorious murder case involving Pietro Divine, the killer for the Black Hand. Francis had found incontrovertible evidence linking Divine to seventeen missing persons, including five members of the same family, mother, father, and three small children, their skeletal remains discovered in a gravel pit in an abandoned Little Hell brickyard.

He’d also uncovered evidence of corruption in the police department, linking several high-ranking men to the Black Hand. Francis testified against Rusty Cabell and the captain over at Dearborn Street, despite being warned that the judge was also in cahoots with the Sicilians. The case got thrown out of court. Cabell was promoted to captain at Robey Street, and Francis got tossed from the force.

That had been more than three years ago—around the same time that Bill Hickey, a former colleague of Francis’s, had taken over as head of the amusement park’s police force. They ran into each other at a saloon a few weeks after Francis’s dismissal.

“Come work with me, Francis,” Hickey urged as he peeled a hard-boiled egg. “Pay’s good. Two dollars a day. Three if you work till midnight and close the place.”

Francis had stared stonily into his glass of beer and refused to reply. Hickey shook his head.

“You got snookered, Francis, I know that. But you need a job, and it would be good to have another policeman working with me—they’re detailing everyone from the force to the Loop these days, or Little Hell. Half my staff are night watchmen from the meat plants, they don’t know a bunco artist from their auntie’s arse. It’d be a favor to me, Francis.”

Francis snorted. “Misery loves company.” But he took the job.

The amusement park was seasonal work, but it paid well, and it was better than walking the haberdashery floor at Marshall Field’s, which is what Francis did during the rest of the year. The stray kids who ran around the park called him Fatty, but Bacon was tall and well built, with auburn hair and very light grey eyes. The summer sun had burnished his ruddy skin and streaked his mustache gold. Come fall, he’d be wearing an ill-fitting suit and escorting light-fingered men and women back out onto State Street.

“Hey, Bacon.”

Francis turned to see another Riverview sergeant hurrying toward him. O’Connell, the lanky young man who worked at the station office. He stopped beside Francis, flapping his hand in front of his face. “Jesus, it’s hot.”

“You ran out here to tell me that?”

“Nope. Lady said her reticule got stolen, over by the incubators.”

Francis made a face. “Isn’t D’Angelo over there?”

“Nope. Hickey’s got him at the Velvet Coaster, they got a big crowd, and Hickey don’t want things to wind up. Kind of a fat old lady, she’s waiting in the station. Hickey says check the incubators first, then come talk to her.”

“All right.” Francis sighed and walked toward the Infant Incubators.

Chapter 6

PIN HADN’T ALWAYS lived at the amusement park—only since her mother, Gina, started working there as a fortune-teller. Pin had been born when her mother was the same age as Pin was now, her sister, Abriana, two years later. Back then they lived in a tenement in Little Hell, the Sicilian slum on Chicago’s North Side. Over the years Gina had told Pin that her father was dead; had moved back to Italy; was mining gold in South America; had run off with the woman who owned the Chinese laundry in Larrabee Street.

Until one day when Pin asked about him, Gina slapped her so hard her left ear rang for an entire day. She never brought it up again.

Little Hell was overshadowed by a huge gashouse, which belched flames and fumes that blotted out the sun. Day and night, red-neckerchiefed men shoveled tons of coal into the furnace, then doused the glowing coals with water from the river. The resulting gas was stored in huge tanks, their cylinders rising during the day, then dropping overnight as the gas was piped into the surrounding tenements for lights and heat and cooking. As a very young girl, Pin had mistaken the furnace’s deafening thunder for that of approaching trains.

The women from the Relief and Aid Society complained constantly about how their white uniforms turned black as they approached Little Hell. They never drew near to Death Corner, where the Black Hand gangs that ruled Little Hell dumped the bodies of their victims beneath a dead tree twisted as a corkscrew. Pin had stopped counting the number of murders when it reached a hundred.

They had left Little Hell in May, when Gina started working as a Gypsy fortune-teller at Riverview. She also worked at the park’s vast ballroom, teaching customers the latest dance crazes—fox-trot, turkey trot, grizzly-bear hug, bunny hug. Before, she’d sewn ribbons onto women’s hats for a milliner in State Street. But hat sales had dropped after Christmas and never picked up again, and the shop closed in April.

There was no money for the rent. For a week they’d eaten nothing but coarse wheat flour boiled in water.

The night before they fled their tenement, Gina had locked the door to the room. Pin didn’t know why she bothered; they had nothing to steal. The floors were bare dirt and the walls patched with cardboard; you could punch your hand right through. There was a hole she used to spy on the family who lived next to them, a scrawny man who used to climb on top of his wife on the kitchen table and, sometimes, his daughters.

Putting a finger to her lips, Gina dropped to her knees in front of the sofa and dragged out a burlap sack Pin had never seen before. Her mother rummaged through it, pulling out a pair of knickerbockers and a white cambric shirt.

“Get undressed and try these on. Mrs. Puglia gave them to me after her son ran off to Montana.”

Pin stared at her, dumbfounded, until Gina threw the clothes in her face. Pin grabbed them, tore off her pinafore and chemise, and kicked them across the floor. She pulled on the knickerbockers and shirt, fingers shaking so she almost couldn’t button them. There was no mirror in the room, but her mother’s expression told her what she needed to know.

“Am I…?”

Gina nodded.

Pin bit her lip so she wouldn’t cry. For as long as she could recall, this was all she’d wanted. When she remembered her dreams, she recalled being neither girl nor boy, only flying, nothing between her skin and the wind. She hated waking up, even more so in the last six months since she’d first menstruated and her mother had explained, or tried to, what the blood on her drawers portended. Childbirth, babies—the end of freedom. The end of everything.

Being a girl was like a huge scab she couldn’t scrape off, no matter how hard she tried. As she stood there in her new clothes, her mother produced the shears she used to trim ostrich willows. She grasped a handful of Pin’s unruly curls and began to cut.

At last the snicking of the shears stopped. Pin ran a hand across her cropped head, then took a few deep breaths so she could feel the air moving inside this strange new creature, herself. Her mother handed her an elastic truss, designed for a small man.

“Your titties are so small, you hardly need this,” she said. “But wear it anyway. You have to stay safe. We’re not going to use our real names—I don’t want anyone knowing who we are.”

“Why?”

Gina slapped her, hard enough Pin’s eyes sparked. “You know why! If anyone asks, your name’s Maffucci. Not Onofria: Maffucci.”

Pin turned so her mother wouldn’t see her tears. “What about yours?”

“Maffucci, the same as yours. Of course it will be the same. I’m still your mother.” She pulled Pin close and embraced her for a heartbeat, Gina’s breath scented with Sen-Sen and schnapps, then quickly pushed her away. “In the fall it will be different. Till then, you need to stay safe.”

Safe? Pin bit her lip to keep from arguing with her. No one was ever, ever safe.

Chapter 7

PIN CAUGHT THE streetcar to Uptown, clutching her cap as she pushed her way past the straphangers to poke her head out a window in the back. She closed her eyes and pretended she was by the lake. She’d been there only once, the summer before her younger sister, Abriana, disappeared. The boys from Riverview went sometimes, but she couldn’t take the risk. It was hard enough to keep her shirt on when everyone else peeled theirs off in the heat to go swimming, and to feign being pee-shy when they urinated in the river.

She drew her head in as the streetcar’s bell jangled, signaling her stop. Its wheels threw up sparks as it screeched around a corner and slowed. She pushed her way to the door, jumped off, and hurried across the intersection, dodging an automobile.

Essanay Studios took up a whole city block, its name above the entrance with its distinctive logo, the profile of an Indian chief wearing an eagle headdress. Outside, the building looked like a factory. Inside, the heavy air smelled of drugstore perfume and cigarette smoke, cleaning fluid, greasepaint, and a peculiar, sweet odor that came from the long spools of motion-picture film. Sometimes she heard hysterical laughter or sobs in here, or a dog barking. Once a man had raced past her, stark naked except for a towel clutched to his privates. Another time she’d ducked into a closet as a dozen policemen strode down the hall, only to realize they were in costume.

She halted when she reached a row of doors. She pushed open the one that bore a sign with the names GLORY and VALERIE on it, revealing two girls in shimmies. They stood side by side, perusing a clothing rack.

“Hi, Glory.”

Glory, the smaller of the two, turned to greet her, baring big white teeth in a smile. “Hiya, Pin. C’mon in,” she said absently, and continued her inspection of the costumes. She wore a silk teddy bare, a sleeveless chemise that clung to her breasts and barely grazed the tops of her thighs. Like Pin, she was slight, just under five feet tall, and deeply tanned, with an olive tinge to her smooth skin, thick black hair, and striking sapphire-blue eyes. She had a mole on her chin that she covered with powder when she had to go in front of the camera, and she smelled of cardamom and sugar and toasted almonds—her aunt Inga often sent her to work with pastries to share.

Lionel jokingly referred to her as Princess Glorious, or the Spanish Princess, and Pin almost believed it. Small as she was, Glory could command a room. She wanted to be an opera singer, not an actress, but the studio paid her well—thirteen dollars for a week’s work as an extra, whether they used her or not, with Sundays off. Only sixteen, Glory looked older, especially when she tilted her head and regarded Pin through narrowed eyes. She regularly got cast as an imperious matron or headwaitress.

She held up a faded-blue satin gown with half-moon stains beneath the sleeves. “What do you think, Pin? Suit me as a banker’s wife?”

“Sure.” Pin took off her cap and fanned herself. The tiny room was hot enough to melt wax. “That color’s nice with your eyes.”

The other girl, Valerie, grimaced. “God, it’s ugly. You have such nice things, Glory, why would you even want to wear it? It makes you look thirty.”

“I’m supposed to look thirty.” Glory reached for a pincushion and gave Pin a sideways glance. “You looking for Lionel? He’s down in the studio. Here, hold this for me.”

Glory shoved the mass of blue satin into her arms. Pin wrinkled her nose. You’d think the fancy clothes they wore in the movies would smell of perfume and eau de cologne. Instead they reeked of tobacco smoke and perspiration, and sometimes of scorched hair, if whoever’d been wearing them had stood too close to a spotlight.

“I’m heading out.” Valerie pulled a mohair bathing suit over her chemise and plucked a smoldering cigarette from an ashtray. “They want pictures for that Sweedie movie they did at the lake. Newspaper advertisement. See you later, Glorious. Bye, Pin.”

Valerie swanned from the cubicle. When she was gone, Glory rolled her eyes. “She is not going to get her picture taken. Guess who’s here?”

“Who?”

“Charlie Chaplin. Spoor’s trying to sweet talk him to stay with the studio—they’re all down on the stage. Lionel’s with ’em, even though he can’t stand Charlie. Probably the only reason Lionel even came in today is that he’s waiting for you. Don’t you ever worry about bringing that stuff here? Or anywhere?”

Pin flushed and Glory laughed, r. . .