Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [99]
“Have heart,” Max said, sotto voce. “This time it’s only the end of the world for some of you. I haven’t yet learned to play Fire well enough to usher in a full worldwide apocalypse, but trust that I will, dear people. I’m dedicated and I practice daily, so someday I will.”
MAX TOOK HIS SUPPER at the elegant (but unpopular in these days of understandable rage against all things German) Kaiserhof restaurant, just across Broadway from the Metropolitan Opera House. Nearly alone in the large dining room, he ate a leisurely meal of assorted wursts and Bavarian-style potato salad, while reading the paper. He noted that the Billy Sunday Crusade was headed into town and, true to the afternoon paperboy’s promise, things were indeed very bad in Tahiti. A full seventh of its major city Papeete’s entire population had succumbed to the disease, food and medicine were scarce, and the massive piles of the burning dead were everywhere. A country-by-country list of death totals was published on page three, and the numbers were breathtaking. “Well done,” he congratulated himself.
When the check arrived, he paid the exorbitant $1.25 fee with two glistening silver dollars, inviting the mildly astonished waiter to keep the change. Then he added, “But spend those quickly. They’ll fade in a day or two.” The waiter dismissed the strange admonition, thinking the confusion was entirely his fault, due to some defect in his admittedly shaky command of English, which was not his cradle tongue.
Afterwards, Max emerged onto a still-bustling Broadway, enjoying the cool of the evening. “Don’t Try to Steal the Sweetheart of a Soldier” was playing softly from the broadcast speaker mounted outside of the Rexall Drug Store a few doors down. With a full belly and content that he’d seen at least some of the effect his work had done in this greatest of all mundy cities, he decided to head uptown, to be about the real reason for his visit to these shores.
With a short dash he was able to scramble aboard one of Broadway’s electric trolleys, headed uptown, at full acceleration between two stops. Immediately he was greeted with curses and catcalls, as well as actual blows from some of the other passengers standing closest to him.
“Where’s your mask?” one of them yelled.
Even the uniformed trolley operator shouted at him, when he tried to pay the six cent fee, saying, “Don’t you know it’s against the law to board a New York trolley unmasked?”
“But I have a mask,” Max said, and suddenly it was true. A white, butter-cloth mask covered his mouth and nose, just like those worn by the astonished operator and his passengers. Every morning Max played a tune of general conjuration, which he could make use of throughout the day, drawing on it incrementally as a businessman draws upon his expense account. His skill with the magic flute had grown so acute over the ages that he no longer needed to play a separate tune for each small thing he desired.
No one bothered him for the remainder of the ride. In fact they backed as far away from him as the crowded coach would allow, leaving him a truly comfortable amount of room all to his own.
Carrying Fire with him, as always, he rode the merrily clanging Broadway trolley all the way to Columbus Avenue, transferring there to one of the city’s last horse-drawn omnibuses — most of the horses having been taken away to the New Jersey countryside, to help plow open mass trench graves for disposal of the influenza dead. The omnibus brought him due north, paralleling Central Park, deep into the neighborhood called the Upper West Side, where he finally disembarked at 104th Street. Max walked from there, following Fire’s gentle pull, leading him to where he would stay the night. He walked east, along