Unfinished Sympathy

by Andy Conway

“Yes.”

  “No papers. No passport.”

  “I was mugged yesterday, a couple of streets from the Flatiron — the Fuller building.”

  “No crime report.”

  “I was getting round to it. The shock, you know.”

  “Yet you got round to Union Square to ask questions about Selig Silverstein and Jack Zelig.”

  “I think there’s been some mistake.”

  “You’re right there’s been a mistake, buddy. Your mistake was walking into my hood and asking questions about lowlifes.”

  He would have to escape now, soon. Either flee New York or this time altogether. This bloodhound would come sniffing every pocket till he affirmed Mitch had no papers and had not come through Ellis Island. He was an illegal alien.

  “Do you know Big Jack Zelig?” Lieutenant Becker asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then why you asking for him?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You know Kid Twist?”

  “Who? I don’t—”

  “Chick Tricker? Cyclone Louie? What about Gyp the Blood?”

  “I don’t know who any of these people are. I was looking for Selig Silverstein. Selig, not Zelig.”

  “Oh, political, are ya? You an anarchist troublemaker?”

  Mitch sighed and splayed his arms out. You’ve got me. “I believe he might be involved in a plot to blackmail Alma Mahler. I’m investigating on her behalf.”

  “You got a licence to be a private dick?”

  “It’s for a friend.”

  “You a Jew?”

  “What? No. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  “You’re staying at the Jewish place.”

  “The Majestic?”

  “Sure. You know it’s the Jewish place as well as I do. Only swanky hotel in town that will let your type through the doors.”

  “I’m not Jewish.”

  “That’s why The Judeans and the Jewish Guild meet there.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Mahler. Ain’t he that Jew conductor everyone’s talking about at the Met?”

  “Yes, he’s the famous conductor, and composer, actually.”

  “Always the Jews. I got Jew gangsters, Jew anarchists, and Jew conductors. And Jew private dicks sticking their hook noses in where they shouldn’t.”

  Mitch sighed. “I assure you, my only interest in this man Selig Silverstein is to find out if he’s a danger to Madame Mahler. She was attacked and there was a card for Marshall’s Hotel with his name written on it, left at the scene of the crime.”

  “Another crime not reported. You putting me out of a job?”

  Lieutenant Charles Becker cracked his knuckles and Mitch wondered if he was going to carry on where Selig Silverstein had left off. He pulled his wounded paw close to him. Becker noticed and smiled.

  Someone knocked the door and entered. A uniformed cop, a sergeant, called Becker outside. They murmured beyond the door, and walked off, their boots slapping the hard floor.

  Becker returned five minutes later, with a roll of banknotes as thick as his wrist. He opened his desk drawer and dropped it in. “Get up and get out.”

  “What?”

  “You’re free to go. Someone paid your bail.”

  Bail? He hadn’t been charged or brought before a judge. No bail had been set. Wasn’t that how it was done? “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “You got friends in high places. Another Jew. A rich one.”

  Becker shoved Mitch to the door where the desk sergeant waited. “I don’t want to see you here again.”

  The desk sergeant frogmarched Mitch to the reception, where Otto Kahn waited, immaculate in spats and a silver topped cane.

  He took Mitch outside without a word, down stone steps to painful daylight. Bitter cold. The snow was fading from the streets but it was icier. The air bit at his face.

  “What’s going on, Otto? They said you’d paid my bail.”

  “Is zat vot they call it? Bail. Hah. No, my friend. That voz a rather large bribe. Now, why don’t you tell me just vot is going on with you and the Mahlers?”

  Mitch shook his kid-gloved hand off. Otto might have paid his bail, but he was a suspect, just like the rest of them.

  “Perhaps ask that man Gilhooly you hired. Maybe he’ll tell you.”

  He marched off up the street, no idea where he was going, just desperate to get away from Mr Monopoly and that damned police station.

  He had a day, maybe two days, before they came and locked him up for being an illegal. He had to make it count and finish this thing.

  — 24 —

  HE GOT BACK TO THE Majestic and skulked through the reception, all too aware that he looked like a dissolute wretch; the clichéd Hooray Henry, hungover in a tuxedo. All that was missing was a magnum of Champagne swinging at his side.

  Desperate to wash and change, and to sleep for about a week, he called at the Mahlers’ suite to find Alma pacing.

  “Mitchell! At last!” she wheedled. “I thought you had abandoned me.”

  She knew he’d spent the night in jail, surely? Hadn’t she sent Otto Khan to rescue him?

  “You naughty man, gallivanting on the town all night when you should be at my side!”

  “I’ve just got out of the police sta—”

  “Yes, very well, but we are to go to Mrs Seney Shelden’s in less than an hour. A very important engagement.” She waved an invitation card.

  All hope of a bath and sweet sleep disintegrated. “Let me change my clothes.”

  “Of course. You look like a bohemian. I can’t possibly be seen with you like that. Go. Hurry.”

  He left her, still pacing, fanning herself with the invitation card. Down the long corridor, face burning with fatigue, and with shame, resentment.

  He stripped, threw water on his face, changed into a crisp shirt and Gustav’s day suit, brushed his teeth, felt human again and realized he hadn’t eaten and his belly was growling dissent.

  In the mirror he looked presentable. No one would know he’d spent the night in a stinking cell. He allowed himself a lingering, longing glance at the bed.

  Alma smiled with delight, as if she hadn’t scolded him for forgetting an engagement he’d known nothing of. Her moods changed with the wind.

  A carriage took them to East 38th Street, the Murray Hill district.

  “Gustav is working at the Met with his flirty soprano,” Alma said. “Even though it is Saturday, and he will most likely be there all afternoon. The brutes work him so hard.”

  Was it a ruse? Mitch wondered. Was Gustav using the Met as cover for a clandestine rendezvous with Olive Fremstad, the busty, flirty, vivacious soprano?

  They pulled up at a row of brownstones. It was nothing like the ostentatious mansions of Fifth Avenue, but modestly impressive.

  They swept inside to find a grand hall with a marble staircase that swept them up to a ballroom. Inside, ladies and gentlemen milled about in the space at the rear of the gilded room, a few taking seats in the rows of chairs. A string quartet whined at the far end on a modest stage, largely ignored. Tea was served in china cups. Waiters brought round platters of caviar and blinis, and Mitch devoured a few, swooning with relief.

  Dr Fraenkel squirmed through the crowd and sidled up to Alma, that insane grin on his face, at once mocking and unsettling.

  “You are looking distressed, Mr Mitchell,” he said, peering at him through a monocle. “You must sleep and rest. I would prescribe two weeks in a sanatorium.”

  “Thank you. I’ll go book it right away.”

  “Here we see the fascinating cross-section of New York musical society,” Fraenkel continued, puffing his chest out a little. “We have the high society people who go to the Met to see Italian opera.”

  “They go to the Met to be seen,” Mitch said.

  “How true. Very droll. They go to the Met to be seen to like Italian opera.”

  Alma cackled as if Dr Fraenkel had told the
funniest joke in the world.

  “And here they will be lectured by the critics, who study German opera and want to brag about it.”

  Alma batted him with her fan. “Dr Fraenkel. You are cruel.”

  He grinned. “I merely make an honest diagnosis of what I see.”

  “It is so much nicer than Vienna opera society. There they were so vicious. Here there is such democracy.”

  “Is there?” Mitch said.

  “Why of course! Here there is such love for artistic genius, regardless of its class.”

  Mitch turned away and rubbed the knot between his eyes. Alma was so blind. Did she know the Majestic was the only hotel taking Jews? Had Otto Kahn colluded in booking them there? The whole rotten New York Met, with its directors who hated Jews but hired them, and took their money but wouldn’t let them have a box. And there was Mary Seney Shelden, circulating her soiree with that smug smile and butter-wouldn’t-melt, patron-of-the-arts shtick. She was as bad as the rest of them. The rich Four Hundred families who ate gold and let the rest of Manhattan live in rat-infested slums.

  He stumbled to a table at the back where two black servants kept the teapots. Their glazed expressions as they poured him another cup made him want to smash Mary Seney Shelden’s china to bits.

  But he quietly sipped his tea and hated himself for colluding in this charade.

  The rich ladies of Manhattan, along with a few gentlemen, were politely reminded to take their seats so the educational and illuminating talk could begin, and three dusty-haired old fossils from the New York Classical Music Society expounded on the vital questions facing the nation: why had America not yet produced a classical music to rival that of Europe? Why had America not yet produced a Bach or a Mozart? And from where was America’s Bach or Mozart going to come?

  The three ageing gentlemen droned on and on about this question to the rapt attention of the ladies — more attentive than any of them had been at the opera last night — and wondered if their classical music schools were good enough; did they need more European teachers? Could America truly produce its own classical music without European influence? Everyone accepted that having a luminary like Gustav Mahler at the Metropolitan Opera would influence America to produce its own classical music, but, and here Madame Mahler must forgive them their impertinence for even considering the question, but could his undoubted greatness perhaps stifle the development of American classical music?

  Much laughter.

  Alma nodded graciously and stood. “My husband’s work,” she said, “as with every other European composer, is deeply rooted in European folk music, and perhaps America does not yet have its own classical music because it does not have a folk music that is truly its own.”

  There was a great deal of nodding and a smatter of applause.

  August D. Juilliard, white-haired and bent over, stood and promised to bequeath his fortune to the founding of a music school, and hoped that this might gift America its Mozart.

  Thunderous applause greeted him.

  It seemed everyone agreed the problem had been solved. Rich benefactors were going to throw money at music schools and hothouse an American musical genius.

  Mitch listened aghast, trying not to laugh aloud.

  None of them could conceive that America’s classical music was already being midwifed into being and it was happening at the Marshall Hotel. It was happening in New Orleans in gutbucket dive joints. It was happening in disreputable clubs after dark, where ragtime was being melded with marching band tunes, gospel and the blues in a bold new fusion that allowed soloists to improvise extensively, composing concertos on the fly at 100 miles per hour.

  It was the truly American folk music they couldn’t even see, because it was black, not white. It was quite literally beneath them.

  “... and that concludes the formal part of this event.”

  The great clatter of applause slapped Mitch out of his reverie. The string quartet slithered through some inoffensive chamber music and there was a great deal more convivial chatter.

  He noticed that Mary Seney Shelden was talking animatedly to Alma, who seemed distracted, even distressed. Her mouth a grim rictus. Like her death mask, he thought. Yes, he’d seen that too in the sleeve notes of an old album, or perhaps in the pages of a Mahler biography.

  Alma nodded to Mary Seney Shelden and made excuses. She came to Mitch’s side, frowning, a finger to her temple, and said, “I feel quite fatigued, no doubt by last night’s excitement. Take me home.”

  Outside, Mitch hailed a cab and they were rattling along to the Upper West Side in moments. Alma slumped in the carriage, her brow knitted, fiddling with the purse on her lap. Had someone said something to anger her? She was not the same woman who’d entered the soiree.

  He gazed out as they turned into Broadway, fascinated by the theatres as they appeared in the day, without a million light bulbs to shout their wares, and through a Times Square that seemed deserted, the carriage swerving round a few trolley cars and people criss-crossing the tramlines. A woman in a long overcoat down to her leather boots and sporting an enormous tam o’shanter marched across the wide open space and sidled along the carriage. She caught Mitch’s eye and smiled.

  He glanced back at Alma, on a guilty reflex.

  She snatched a little silver flask from her mouth and tucked it in her purse.

  He pretended not to see.

  The tam o’shanter girl was gone.

  As the cab rounded Columbus Circle and hit the home straight of the dozen blocks to home, Alma chatted away, suddenly bright and gay, all about the charming event and the convivial company, and how exciting it was that they would soon have their first music school graduates — imagine a country being so young that this was only just happening!

  Mitch climbed from the cab and escorted her through the Majestic’s doors with a sudden new awareness. He’d seen that change in mood before. He’d seen it in workmates who got more and more crabby, unable to function till they hit the pub and got their first drink inside them and turned into shiny happy people.

  Alcoholics.

  He was wondering if he should confront her over this, or even report it to Gustav, and whether any of it was his business, when a black man stood up and greeted him as they crossed the lobby.

  James Reese Europe smiled. “Mr Mitchell, sir. I’m glad to see you well.”

  “James! You weren’t... last night?”

  James bowed to Alma. “Madame Mahler.”

  “Oh, Mr Europe. Delighted to see you again.”

  He pulled his satchel around. “I brought the cylinder you were interested in. The Buddy Bolden recording. But I didn’t think to check you have a cylinder player.”

  “Oh, we do,” said Alma. “How delightful. Today is such a musical day! You must come to our suite so we can hear it. Please give me a moment.”

  Alma walked on. Mitch waited for the elevator doors to close on her, then turned to James to murmur. “You weren’t arrested last night?”

  “No. It seemed the police came directly looking for you.”

  “Yes, and just in time.”

  “Selig and his boys didn’t harm you? I feared the worst.”

  “It seemed someone tipped them off,” said Mitch. “But now I have the police on my back.”

  “I’m really so very sorry that happened at the Marshall.”

  “Don’t be. My problem.” He patted James on his tweed jacketed arm. “So you’ve really got the Buddy Bolden recording right here?”

  “Indeed. You seemed very interested to hear it.”

  “Oh, you’ve no idea.”

  — 25 —

  AS THEY WALKED TO THE elevator, Mitch took out his notebook and looked up what he’d written down in the drunk tank.

  “Here’s what Selig and his boys said. They mentioned a place called Mann Fang and someone called Mock Duck. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.”

  “Oh, Mann Fang is an opium den in Chinatown,” said James as they stepped into th
e elevator. “It’s on Mott Street. Mock Duck is a tong gangster — they call him the mayor of Chinatown — you don’t want to mess with him.”

  Anarchists, Jewish gangsters and now Chinese mafia. Where was this all leading?

  Clarence, the bell hop, closed the concertina doors on them and Mitch noticed that his welcoming smile faded.

  The lift rattled slowly up to the eleventh floor.

  “And what was he talking about, lobbygows and slumming it, and Chinese actors dancing around with hatchets?”

  “Lobbygows are the white men who run errands for the Chinese and slumming it is the new craze,” said James. “Rich folks like to go visit the seedier parts of the city. It’s why they go to the Tenderloin, and Little Italy. There’s a guy who takes them on tours of Chinatown and, well, those rich folks don’t feel they’ve got their money’s worth unless they see a real opium den and a tong street fight. All Chinese actors. He hires them to create a scene and the rich folks go back to their Upper East Side mansions thinking they’ve seen something real.”

  Mitch noticed Clarence looking James up and down as if he’d never seen a black man talk like that, nor wear a tweed suit and cap.

  “And I guess it’s why they go to Marshall’s too,” said James. “If I’m honest.”

  “Thank you, Clarence,” Mitch said, as they stepped out.

  James cast a glance Clarence’s way but said nothing.

  They walked up the corridor to the Mahlers’ suite and Clarence was still staring after them when Alma let them in.

  “So delightful to have you here!” she sang. “We haven’t had any guests, outside of Mitchell, in so long.”

  Except two days ago, when the place had been full of people, Mitch thought.

  She floated across the room to a walnut table under the window, from which protruded a golden horn, much like someone had fixed a trombone horn onto a jewellery box. James dug from his satchel a cardboard tube, popped it open, and pulled out a black wax cylinder.

  Alma let him attach it to the spindle. He wound it up and they stood around the machine, waiting to hear.

  A crackling beat like the swish of brush sticks on a snare drum. He thought the recording had started but it was just the sound of the cylinder surface. And then music began, faint and distorted, like a band was playing in Mitch’s room, down that long corridor, with the door closed, and a hurricane rocking the building.