Where We're At: Parts 2.17-2.18: Iceland Spar

Dally

• Travels (by train) to New York (where her roommate is Katie, a would-be actress), andl ands a job working for Hop Fong as a girl being sold into white slavery in Chinatown.
• R. Willshire Vibe sees a performance and asks her to be in his Broadway production; she declines at least in part because she's under contract to Hop Fong. Vibe and Fong talk and suddenly there's a lot more money being poured into their scenes, and also suddenly tong wars (between Tom Lee's On Leong tong and rivals Mock Duck and the Hip Sing tong) break out in Chinatown and curtail the white slavery performances.
• Needing work, Dally calls on Vibe. Bad-vaudeville producer Con McVeety is also at Vibe's office; Con has work for her and Vibe doesn't, so Dally goes to work for Con (at his dime museum) as a card girl (the girl who holds cards introducing the acts). (Con also produces a Bowery version of Julius Caesar, called Dagoes with Knives; Dally loses out on a part to a girlfriend of a tong gangster.)
  
• Dally and Katie attend a party at Vibe's, where someone tries to handcuff her and she's rescued by Erlys, her birth mother, whom she goes to live with in a fabulous big apartment with Luca Zombini, Erlys's husband who she left Merle for, and their many children (including Bria, Nunzi, Cici, Dominic, Lucia, and Concetta) who participate in the family magic act.
  
• Parts of Zombini's act are built around using the Nicol prism and double refraction (via Iceland spar). Minor problem is that the double refraction is actually creating two actual people (from one). He's consulted with Vanderjuice, and it's a problem with a hole in time. The only possible way to fix it might be with mirrors which are only available from the Isola degli Specchi (Isle of Mirrors) in Venice.
• Erlys tells Katie that Merle wasn't actually her birth father--it was one Bert Snidell, who was killed before Dally was born and whose family would have nothing to do with Erlys.
• The whole Zamboni family, including Dally, travel to Venice to perform (and for Zombini to try to de-create the duplicate people via a conjurer's mirror from the Isle of Mirrors).

Reef

• Is still with Stray (and son Jessse), mostly, drifting from job to job or scam to scam. (There's another image of the closed frontier here, parlor society, loss of freedom.)
  
• Meanwhile, he's using carousing as a cover for dynamiting. He bombs something too close to home and Stray finds out about his double life. (There's a bit about the day of atonement or possibly the second coming, coming.)
• The anarchists who've died in the conflicts are relying on Reef to continue (or he's hallucinating the following a particularly loud explosion).
  
• It's time for Frank to take up the revenge action, so Frank heads for Denver to find Frank.
• En route to Denver, a man-caused avalanche nearly kills Reef; the Owners Association is after him. Reef returns to Stray, says goodbye, and goes undercover.
• Reef creates himself as "east coast nerve case" Thrapston Cheesely III and meets traveling Englishwoman Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, who brings him along (keeps him) with her band of neurasthenics. They eventually land in New Orleans, where they part after a drunken quarrel.
• Reef meets bandleader Dope Breedlove and travelling Irish insurrectionist Wolfe Tone O'Rooney, who is raising money for the Land League to funnel to the Colorado miners and who mentions that he'd hoped to meet the Kieselguhr Kid, who seems not to be active any more.
• O'Rooney takes Reef in and introduces him to Flaco, another European anarchist dynamiter. Wolfe leaves for Mexico. Flaco and Reef wait for tramp steamer Despedida, which will be going to Genoa where they'll look for work dynamiting tunnels.

This takes us to page 373.