“That’s Dan Cody,” Nick said quietly, drifting over to me. “Gatsby rounded the Horn with him in 1907.”
Before I could react to that bit of news （doing the math now, Gatsby would have been seventeen at the time）， Gatsby hung up the phone with a muttered curse and came to take the picture out of my hands.
“Cody was a good man,” he said with a slight smile at me. “Think of him every time someone at the house asks for that damned pisco from Chile. He was a Chicago man, through and through, and it’s only Chicagoans that drink that stuff.”
“And Chileans, possibly,” I suggested, but no one was listening.
“Can we go back to Chicago, Jay?” asked Daisy, spinning lazily in his chair. “I did love it so. They’re saying that they’ve found a way to send their winter downstate, so it’ll always be sunny on Michigan Avenue…”
A brief frown passed over Gatsby’s face, and I saw his eyes flicker around the room. Just as quickly he shrugged, because if he could raise a palace like this out of the muck of West Egg, then he could certainly do it next to Lake Michigan as well.
“Of course we can,” Gatsby said, spreading out his hands. “Why stop there? We could go to Paris, Marrakesh, Johannesburg, perhaps even have Jordan show us around Ceylon.”
The last was addressed to me with a broad wink, one that I acknowledged with an eyebrow raised in mock friendliness.
“Well, if you want to test my ability to find a drink in under twenty minutes, we certainly can, but for something really exotic, why don’t we ask Nick? He could show us all the wonders of St. Paul.”
“My great-grandmother was from Bangkok,” Nick said suddenly, and I reached over to give his face a little squeeze.
“And such a family resemblance, don’t you think?” I asked, and he ruffled my hair with a grin.
“Not in the least, dear. Her parents were missionaries from the order of Francis the Redeemer. She was born on the banks of the Gulf of Siam just as her mother and father disembarked from the ramps of their ship, the Carmine.”
Closer then, in some ways, than mere geological coincidence, though Nick certainly didn’t know that. I had never told him the sad and tragic story of Eliza Baker, or how I came to be a Louisville Baker myself. I suddenly wondered how he thought I’d come about at all.
Of course Daisy knew, and she had already grown bored with this conversation. She wandered from the study to the conservatory with the three of us in her wake like the tails of a lovely kite, and in the conservatory, quite to our surprise, we discovered a piano player.
Michel Klipspringer had fled Germany that year, not ahead of any wartime retribution, but after his wife, famous stage actress Greta Manning, took up with some high-ranking warlock or another. They crowned him with a pair of the most delicate and dear antelope horns that stuck up insistently from his curly brown hair. It turned out to be a mistake, as he ended up shooting them both, killing the warlock and maiming his wife. He fled to Makhnovia, which ceased to exist when the Bolsheviks pulled the plug, and then to Greece, and then to New York City.
I had seen him a few times that I had been to Gatsby’s parties, but admittedly I had never seen him in his striped undershirt and drawers, scrambling up from a decidedly awkward position on the floor. His clothes hung neatly over the edge of an open cabinet door, and his heavy black concert shoes were pressed, toe-first, to the wall.