Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Dev’s hands strangled one another. “And then?” he said.

  And then? And then you can take me away, Dev, Devajyoti, brightest one I ever knew. Our lovers have left us and our lives aren’t what we thought they might be and we have been in the way of loving each other too long, I think, to stop now.

  But I asked him for a cigarette. He pulled two from a pack in his vest pocket and I held my lighter ready. The scored circle in the metal pressed against my shaking fingers. I took a long drag, coughed, and lost track of everything but pain and his voice, reeling me in.

  “You should sleep,” he said. His arm was around my back and my head lolled on his shoulder and I shook every time I took a breath.

  “I can’t even hate the woman who did this to me,” I said, and then the last few pieces decided to snap together. How clearly I remembered his voice in my dream. “Maryann. Trent. Was he really a stoolie?”

  “He’d agreed to testify, but—” Dev jerked and then laughed, looked down at me, and wiped his eyes. “That was low, Pea.”

  “It was clever.”

  “You were awake? That whole time?”

  “I was stiff on morphine, but I guess I still heard you.”

  He sighed, the way you sigh after a long kiss in the dark. “Ask.”

  “You made a deal to save me?”

  “Yes. Before you killed Trent.” It was like watching Dev merge with his reflection, the one in that dark mirror that I had always seen in myself, but never suspected in him. He felt sharper, fuller. “Pea, I dragged you off of Trent’s body. I was a witness to a murder. Either I testified against you or I found someone better to give them.”

  I gasped. “Dev—you don’t—the Dewey investigation?” By the fall of ’35, police headquarters on Centre Street had become a charnel house for New York’s most infamous mobsters. The newly appointed police commissioner Lewis Valentine and District Attorney Thomas Dewey had political aspirations and a knack for making themselves out to be real-live comic-book heroes for the press. By the time the indictments wound down, Victor had been one of the few left standing.

  Dev hesitated, then nodded. He shouldn’t be telling me this. I could kill him with a stray word, a glance.

  I sucked on my teeth. “I always wondered why you’d get mixed up with some blustering fool like Dutch Schultz!”

  He laughed softly. “Is Victor much better?”

  “He has more style, at the least. But Dev … you came back. You’re still there. Why hasn’t Dewey dragged Victor in years ago?”

  He looked away from me. “I’ve given them plenty. His midtown operations, his illegal shipments from the dockyards.”

  I took that in. “But not me,” I said hoarsely.

  “They say Victor has betrayal in his hands, but the truth is he had found a … way to steal it off of us.”

  “You mean, it’s real? Vic can use the hands?”

  “They work for him, but I don’t think they like it, if that makes any sense. They play tricks on him.”

  “They must have told him about Trent.”

  Dev nodded. “But then again, I’ve kept his trust for these ten years.”

  “I have to kill him,” I repeated. God, but for a second my wrists hurt more than my arm.

  Dev just shook his head. I breathed him for a little while, and then the cigarette he held to my lips.

  “You said you haven’t done a job in seven months.”

  I laughed, which was a mistake. When I finished coughing, I said, “And what’s it to you?”

  “I’ve been thinking I could—” The voice from my dream. I closed my eyes, as though that would keep him here, wide open and breaking against me. “Remember those watermelon seedlings you bought in Hudson? That fancy new kind we paid through the nose for? You planted them right beside my mother’s tea roses. They’re regular nabobs of the garden, Pea. The oddest colors. Purple like a snowy night sky. Speckled yellow like stars.”

  I turned my head and rested my lips against the sharp lapel of his jacket. The cloth smelled of him, of the clean sweat of making love and weeding the garden in those amber days in the house by the river.

  “What happened to the goat?” I asked.

  His arm tightened around me. “She died,” he said. “She stopped eating and I couldn’t watch her starve to death. So I put her in my lap and slit her throat.”

  6

  There was a story about Red Man, the kind the young soldiers liked to tell, about how he once beat a man to death for keeping back a cadillac of dope after a delivery. And when that unfortunate was holding his face together with the back of his shattered hand, crying for his mother, Red Man pulled out that little envelope and ripped it in half. A rain of glittering heroin snow settled on the blood and dirt of that hellish back alley and Red Man took out his camera, since it looked so beautiful. Then he stove in the side of the soldier’s head with the steel toe of his boot.

  The part about the camera was true, though I wasn’t sure about the rest of it.

  But this was just after I started working for Victor. That particular soldier had seen me dancing in the Times Square club and liked to shout offers for Victor’s yellow-skint octaroon whenever he was drunk and I couldn’t get away. I was passing with Victor’s crew, and he would have known the danger I’d be in if the wrong person heard him. One day that loudmouth ofay worked with us and the next he didn’t—years later, Walter showed me a picture of a face like uncured sausage, white powder caked in the gashes and clumped in long, wet eyelashes. You got a knack for chiaroscuro, Walter Finch, I said, and we both smiled.

  * * *

  Walter Finch was light when he picked me up from the hospital ten days after the shooting: gentle, cheerful, undemanding. He wasn’t the sort of man to wear his violence on the outside, not like Victor. Another of our quiet affinities. I, too, could bide my time with what I had to tell him. Tamara waited against the door of his silver Packard, a paisley scarf wrapped around her hair. The solvent heat and noon sun had shrunk her, or perhaps just the space she occupied; she smiled to see me, but her eyes looked upside-down with pain.

  “What happened?” I asked after I had settled myself, awkwardly, into the back seat.

  “Don’t you dare! You can’t get shot before my eyes, Phyllis, and then go asking how I’m doing! Here, you want a pillow? I made Walter bring pillows.”

  I bore her ministrations with detached patience; my parting drink of morphine still murmured dulcet comfort, and if I kept very still, that song could drown out the world.

  “I’m so glad to see you, Pea,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “I tried and tried to read your numbers, but I guess you’re special, sugar, ’cause they want you to be here before they tell me anything.”

  She held up her familiar card deck, the faded backs, soft as old leather, with an open palm and a closed fist trapped in violet bramble.

  “You want to read them now?”

  She sucked her teeth. “The luck you been having, I don’t think they can wait.”

  “Well,” I said, and wondered why the sight of those cards was pricking me, uneasy, in the ribs. She spread a blanket between us and started to shuffle, the cards flying faster than a hummingbird’s wings.

  “But what’s happened with you, baby?” I asked. “Something’s wrong, I can tell.”

  Tamara just shook her head and shuffled even faster. She had that chipped porcelain smile she got whenever Victor spent too long backstage. I put my left arm around her shoulders. The cards spilled, the jokers and jacks and spades face up and staring.

  “It’s Clyde,” Tamara said, “it’s that fool!” She smacked the back of Walter’s seat with an open palm, and let out a cry like an animal in a trap.

  Walter’s driving was funereal and he kept his eyes on the road, but I caught his grimace in the rearview mirror.

  “Her soldier boy shipped off,” he said.

  Tamara moaned. “Clyde wouldn’t stay, no matter what I said, just like last time. He says he loves me and t
he next breath he’s promising to write. Like he ever does! So I don’t care what Hitler does to him—”

  She seemed ready to blow her nose on my sling, so I asked Walter for a hankie. “Tamara,” I said, almost laughing and so sad I could cry with her. “Tammy, honey, what did you want him to do, dodge the draft? Get arrested? He still wouldn’t be with you in jail.”

  “He always finds a way to leave. He’s that boy, the one I fell for back in Lawrenceville. I told you.”

  “The actor?”

  She sighed against me. “He’s just so goddamn beautiful, Pea.”

  “I know. But he was drafted. Doesn’t mean he don’t love you.”

  “Victor could have—”

  Walter must have flinched; the car jolted at the same time I interrupted her: “Don’t. You might be young, but you ain’t stupid. You’ve seen enough to know how it is. You want that for him? Someone you love?”

  She bit her lip. “What about Dev?”

  “What about him?”

  “He runs for Victor. And I bet you he won’t be getting himself killed halfway around the world in some white man’s war, either. Why’s it good enough for him and not Clyde?”

  I closed my eyes, afraid that Tamara or Walter might read the fear there, my new and terrible knowledge of Dev’s double life. He could have died anytime in the last decade, and I hadn’t even known.

  “Tamara, leave her be.”

  “It’s not good enough for either of them. But at least your Clyde has the sense to know it.”

  This pricked her upright; she glared at me and swelled. “Won’t you ever forgive him?”

  I started laughing.

  “What?” Tamara said. “Damn it, Pea, don’t make fun—”

  “That’s what you think? Honey, if there’s any forgiveness going around, I’m the one who needs it.”

  “Tamara,” Walter said, heavily. “Leave this. Please. Let’s get upstairs.”

  Tamara bit her lip and bent to retrieve her cards. She froze when she saw how they had fallen, all those spades face-up, pointing at me like a devil’s garden, and a family of royals pulling the weeds.

  “Walter, tell me you’ve got someone watching Pea’s back.”

  He looked thoughtful, then nodded. “I’ll put someone on the building tonight.”

  Tammy gave him a sour look from behind puffy eyes. “If something happens to her again—”

  Walter raised one hand—a benign enough gesture—and Tammy’s words turned back hard enough to bruise. “Our angel has been at this since you were a girl, Tamara. If something gets her, I promise you, she knew it was coming.”

  * * *

  “We haven’t found Maryann West yet,” Walter said, just before leaving me. Tamara had gone back to the car. “But I’m hunting, and so we will. Victor wanted you to know.”

  I stared at him for a good while, long enough that anyone else would have blinked or shuffled or asked me what I wanted. Walter just waited like the Buddha.

  I bore it almost as well, though my arm had started to hurt more than the morphine could suppress.

  “What I really need to know,” I said at last, “is why you’re lying about this. Maryann West didn’t kill those people. Neither did Trent Sullivan. Victor did. Victor is, I suppose, and there you are, shoveling shit for him like it’s your job.”

  “It is. I don’t know why you ever thought it wasn’t. Vic never kept me around for my good looks.”

  I remembered what he had told me about his kids, about his wife. “Think he’d still let me get away, Walter?”

  “I think you’re not very safe with that woman alive, whatever Victor wants.”

  Walter had worked for Victor since the beginning. He had to know the sordid mob politics behind each act of supposedly angelic justice. Had he, like Dev, assumed I guessed?

  “Why did he have me kill Trent Sullivan, all those years ago?”

  Walter kept his answer for a long moment; I could see him measuring me, and then his words, on a scale whose counterweight only he knew. He smiled a Red Man smile. “Trent worked part-time as a spotter. For people with appropriate talents. He was the one who found you at that club.”

  Now I did sit down, hard, on my chaise lounge. I shivered. Trent Sullivan had found me at the club. Where I tossed darts at the fruit that I juggled while naked, letting the perfect halves fall down around me in circles.

  Trent had known how to see us, the ones whom the hands had visited and left with their heavy luck. He gave our names to Victor. And then I had seen the photos of what happened next.

  “Why aren’t I long dead, then?”

  “The night you and Victor met, don’t you remember? You walked right up and offered him a deal. And he took it.”

  I’m sick of swinging my girls on stage. That was my voice, wasn’t it? Or had been, a hundred years ago. I can throw knives, Mr. Vic. I can throw knives and I’m willing to throw them at those who don’t deserve to walk this earth anymore. You help me kill the bastard that killed my brother and I’ll kill any other real bastard that you like. I’ll be your angel of justice—your knife to throw.

  Vic had laughed for nearly a minute. Now I knew why. I was an ignorant girl, whose hands were the only part of me he’d ever wanted. It must have been like hearing his steak begging for its life. But he’d agreed—Victor had helped me find the bastard who’d gunned down Roger in a basement card parlor on Amsterdam Avenue. And from then on I was his. Not an angel, but a very fine knife.

  “And Trent? What’d he do to deserve a visit from me?”

  Walter sighed. “He was a snitch. But I’m guessing someone told you that already. You might think about that. The plans Victor has for you, now. I owe him too much. My life, still. But you don’t, now, do you?”

  I didn’t breathe. Then I made myself exhale, slow and businesslike. “I’m going to kill him.”

  Walter’s eyes went soft. “Take it easy, Phyllis. Whatever you decide, I won’t stop you.”

  We said goodbye; he left; I was alone. Someone told you already. But he couldn’t know—

  I considered that I hadn’t seen Dev in four days.

  I tried to read for a while—Their Eyes Were Watching God, Quicksand, Persuasion, my neglected copy of The Nazarene, which Gloria had raved about last Christmas—but even Hurston couldn’t keep my interest for more than a dozen pages. I wished the sun away, not because I craved darkness, but because then I would have survived another day. I stared at the clock, considered the wisdom of drinking at 3:20 in the afternoon, and pulled out the latest New Amsterdam News and New Yorker—food for Phyllis Green and armor for Phyllis LeBlanc.

  My phone rang at four o’clock. I’d slipped into a merciful doze, cheek pressed wetly against a cartoon of Hitler marching across Russia, but I sprung up at the sound.

  “Phyllis, that is you, right?”

  “Hiya, Gloria.” I sank back onto the chaise. I felt glad to hear her voice, and immediately weary.

  “I’ve called you three times in the last week! Where have you been?”

  I considered. “Slow boat to China?”

  She sighed. “I was worried, you know.”

  “You coulda come over.”

  “You don’t like it when I do. Don’t play martyr to me, Phyllis. You’re my little sister, you can’t stop me from loving you.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Well,” she said, laughing, “if it ain’t happened by now. So where you been? Having fun, I hope? A new man?”

  Dev had put his arm around me, he had agreed to help. But I had hurt him somehow, and almost died in his arms; impossible to tell how much of that sweetness was nostalgia and how much was love. “It looks like I’m on the market, but not yet.”

  “You were seeing that ’fay dentist, weren’t you? Got tired of him?”

  “More like he got tired of me.”

  “Oh, honey. Is that why you didn’t pick up the phone?”

  “Sort of?”

  “Then what’s the rest of it?”
/>
  “I was in the hospital, Glory.”

  “For—for eight days?”

  “Ten.” I waited. “Glory?”

  “What—what happened?”

  “A bullet.”

  “Where?”

  “High chest, right side. Played hell with my arm, but I’ll be all right.”

  Her breath came tight through the receiver, otherwise I’d have thought she’d hung up. My throat ached, but I wouldn’t beg for sympathy; that had been my deal from the start.

  Finally she said, “Come here. Live with us. Ida can sleep with Sonny, and you can have the extra room. I won’t lose you, too, Phyllis—Phyllis, if you had died, would anyone have even told me?”

  “Dev would have,” I said.

  “You know I don’t hold with what Tom thinks about your … talent, but sometimes I am mighty angry with the Lord for giving you and Roger that burden.”

  “This isn’t like what happened to—”

  “Roger got killed! A few inches to the left and that man you love would have knocked on my door with your ashes. Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to stop … doing what you do? I know Tom and I can’t offer you that downtown lifestyle, but we can offer love, honey, and safety, and Ida just adores you—”

  “But poor Sonny,” I said. My tears didn’t show in my voice, I was almost sure. I had wanted this too badly to wish for it: my respectable Gloria, upending her whole life to save her prodigal sister.

  “He’ll come around. Will you? Please say yes.”

  Harlem felt a world away, but it was just a couple of miles. Maybe I’d had a chance before Maryann West shot me, but now nothing would make Victor let me go.

  And nothing would ease my responsibility to wield my knives—one last time.

  “I love you, Gloria. I love you more than anything. And if I make it out of this, I swear you won’t have to worry about me again.”