by Michael Mayo
When I said the name, Bobby cursed, “That cocksucking son of a bitch.” He got up and paced the room, reminding me of Miss Wray a few hours before. “Spill it,” he said. “What else?”
I told him that the man in charge was a strange young guy. Maybe I should’ve mentioned what went on with the goat in the Grand Central Building, but I didn’t. I said the big cheese lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue and he claimed that he was going to burn the other copies of the book, and he was doing this to punish his brother and kill him.
“His brother? You’re sure he said his fucking brother?”
I nodded. Bobby mulled over that and said, “Trodache used to work for me. Can’t trust him. He stole from me, and he never delivered what he promised.” I could figure what an ex-vice cop promised to deliver Bobby. “How the hell did he get his hands on a copy of the book? Have you seen it?”
I nodded again.
“Do you have it?”
“No,” I lied. “Why?”
“It has a number on the back. That’ll tell me whose copy it is. But . . .” He paused and started talking to himself, trying to convince himself, “No, this doesn’t change anything. It’s still smooth sailing, nothing but smooth sailing.”
When he remembered I was there, he looked up and said, “So Miss Wray has seen it. What did she think?”
“It embarrassed her. The RKO lawyers were interested in how you copied their costumes and sets.”
“I’ll just bet they were.” He laughed, sounding pleased. “You see, I’ve got this guy at RKO who tipped me to it as soon as he heard about the production. He took pictures of the first drawings and sent ’em to me. The minute I saw the idea of a sexy blonde and a giant ape, I knew it was going to go through the roof. Of course, I couldn’t do a big ape, but that didn’t matter, the story’s really about a sexy white woman and a big spade, and I already had the guy. A fellow with an enormous kidney stabber working a sex show up in Harlem. And besides, the girl’s more important than him. That’s what my audience is interested in.”
I said, “What’s the deal with the name, anyway? Oscar Apollinaire?”
“That’s who I am now. Bobby Colodny was somebody else. He was a kid when he left here. What I’m doing now, he couldn’t do. That’s why I grew the Vandyke and shaved my head, so I wouldn’t look like Bobby Colodny anymore. I’ve actually passed some guys from the old neighborhood on the street and they didn’t even look twice at me, not even you.”
I nodded and I could tell he was about to say something else about the Grand Central Building, but he read my look and said, “All anybody sees is the fez and the beard. Nobody from the old days knows I’m here. But now you do. And how did you find me?”
“Through your star, Nola Revere. I showed the book to somebody who knew her from Polly Adler’s place. And I came across one of your cards with the address.” No need to bring Charlie Luciano or Daphne into the picture.
“And you want to know if I had anything to do with Trodache putting the squeeze on Miss Wray?”
“Before I came up here, I thought maybe you did, but not now.”
“Jesus, the last fucking thing I need right now is to get mixed up with a studio. I’ve got too much to do, and I’m not ready for them yet. There’s a hundred things to be done before Sunday. You gotta understand, this is my business. I’ve finally got it to the point where I’m proud of the pictures, and I’m making some good money off them. You’re not going to try to screw me over, are you?”
“It’s not my game. I just told Miss Wray I’d try to find the guy who made the book and see to it that it wasn’t going to be made public. She says her husband would go nuts.”
Bobby sneered. “Her husband, hah, that second-rate phony.”
Seemed like nobody had much use for Saunders. I got down from the stool at the drawing table. Bobby stood up too. Trying to sound like it didn’t mean anything, he said, “Speaking of Nola, you wouldn’t happen to know where she is, would ya?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It’s nothing. It’s just . . . Do you know where she is or not?” By then he wasn’t trying to hide anything. This was important.
“No. Nobody I’ve talked to has seen her since she left Polly’s. And that was when she went to work for you, right?”
He didn’t say anything, and I could tell he was working out what I knew and who’d been talking to me. “It’s not that important,” he lied. “But if you run across her, tell her I’d like to see her.”
I knew it was past time to leave and so did he, but we stood there sizing each other up for a couple of seconds.
He said, “Who’d’ve thought that a couple of guys like us from our neighborhoods would wind up here in the Chelsea? And, you know, this ain’t the best there is. You wouldn’t believe how it is out west. The sun, the ocean, all the space—it’s nothing like the city. Sometimes I want to go back, but, hell, this is it for me. All the time I was out there and when I was on the road with the Projectionists, I wanted to be here.” I knew what he meant.
As I took the stairs down to the fifth floor to check Connie’s room, I tried to fit Bobby into the rest of this screwy business and didn’t get far. Her door was locked tight, so I went on to my room on the third floor and sank into my chair. It was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the stool in Bobby’s workroom. I considered another short brandy but decided it wouldn’t help me think and I was pretty confused right then. I unstrapped my brace as I tried to work through what I knew. None of it fit together, and I knew I wasn’t seeing all the pieces.
I thought about the last things Bobby said and wondered why he wanted to find Nola. That made me curious. Those pictures of her were at the center of this business, and nobody seemed to know where she was. Then thinking about Nola made me think about Connie and what Bobby said about her working for him. That made my stomach hurt, and I needed to warn her about him, but what would she say? And that led me back to Nola, and to Daphne and her sugar daddy in the Village, and the guy who killed the goat, and Miss Wray.
By then I was too tired to think about it, but I had an idea about how I might go after something else that Bobby said.
Chapter Nineteen
I was up early on Saturday, early for me, anyway, and worked through what I was about to try to do.
First, I strapped on the brace and dressed down. Found a pair of denim pants in the back of the wardrobe, a flannel shirt, a beat-up leather jacket, and my Keds. Then I took a minute to look at the pistol and sap I’d taken from Trodache. The sap was steel. The gun was a cheap little silver-plated automatic with broken pearl grips. Looked like it had been through a lot of hands and purses. Trodache kept a round in the chamber. I unloaded it and put the gun and the sap in my lockbox. Collected my hat and stick and loaded up my pockets with knucks, notebook, money clip, and the Banker’s Special.
It was cold and cloudy when I went down to the diner at the corner for hash and eggs. The radio behind the counter was tuned to WOR, where an announcer in Washington was going on about all the people and microphones they had covering the inauguration, and the vast hordes of curious sightseers—common folk and sophisticated cosmopolites—who had filled the city. He mentioned the many prominent New Yorkers in attendance. I perked up when he dropped the name Peter Wilcox. He went on to say the network had portable pack transmitters mounted on the backs of announcers in the crowd. These guys would speak into hand microphones and the machines on their backs would instantaneously send their observations to the control stations and then to the networks. They also had guys in aircraft, including the airship Akron, with shortwave transmitters, and parabolic microphones to pick up the band music. I hadn’t heard a radio guy so excited about something since the Lindbergh kidnapping a year ago.
I wrote cosmopolite in my notebook and finished my breakfast.
On the street, I didn’t see the Olds or Trodache but decided it would be better to take the El, anyway. No need for a cab. I walked to the Ninth Street station and took a tr
ain to Mott and Grand Streets. Nothing unusual happened on the trip. No giant apes tearing up the tracks.
You see, it was about five years before all this happened, in the fall and winter of 1928, when I busted something inside my right knee. That was when A. R. was killed, too, but I’m not going to go over that again. The important part was that I couldn’t walk without a crutch. Dr. Ricardo, a hophead who wasn’t really a doctor but was as close to one as anybody I knew, told me about a guy down in Chinatown who could make a brace for my knee. With the brace and a stick, he said I would be able to walk almost like a normal guy. I couldn’t run anymore, but I could get rid of that damn crutch and that meant a lot to me.
Funny thing was that the guy who made the brace was a Jap, not a Chinaman, and he also made my knucks. He was a blacksmith and toolmaker named Sam. Sam’s father was a mean old man who taught me how to use the stick in a fight. Sam’s son was a kid who translated for his grandfather while the old guy knocked me on my ass several times a day for two weeks.
I got off the El at Grand Street and crossed to Mott. The sidewalk stands were busy. I moved slower than the foot traffic, and I could hear the sound of more radios coming from one storefront to the next, all tuned to broadcasts from Washington. I guess there was nothing else on any station and everybody wanted to hear it as it was happening. I couldn’t remember how many doors Ricardo had told me to count past the intersection, but I was sure I’d know it when I saw it, and I did. The green paint had faded, but there it was, two steps down from the sidewalk. The hallway behind it was still dim, long, and cold. I rapped on the door at the far end with my stick and smelled burning charcoal as I went into a room with two big doors that opened onto a courtyard.
The place had changed, Sam hadn’t. He was still a big guy with massive shoulders. He wore a dark robe under a leather apron as he worked a piece of metal over a forge in the courtyard. But as I remembered, the walls of the room had been covered with handmade metal tools or weapons—I was never sure exactly what they were—and now the rough plank walls were almost empty. I guess the crash hit him just like everybody else.
He turned down the radio and squinted, trying to make out who I was. When he saw the stick, he recognized me.
“Jimmy San.” He sounded happy, hoping I was there to buy something. I was.
We sat down inside, and I showed him how the bottom straps on the brace were wearing out where they folded. He said he could fix them, and I said that was good and I’d take a couple but it wasn’t why I was there.
“Ran into a guy last night who said that he had a place here in Chinatown, a place where he makes moving pictures. It was in a loft, he said. Now, these are the kind of pictures that he has to keep on the private side. Yeah, that kind. He doesn’t want to be disturbed. He also claimed that this loft was so secret no white man could ever find it.”
Sam looked more interested. I’d been a good customer.
“I’d like to look at the place,” I said and took a five out of my shirt pocket. “Can you help me?”
He said to wait and went out to the courtyard. A few minutes later, he came back with his father and his son. The old man used a stick and was every bit as evil-looking as he’d been five years before. The boy had sprouted and was taller than me. He wore dark slacks and a white shirt like he’d been working behind a counter in a store. The three of them yakked away in Japanese. Then the boy said, “Is this dangerous?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”
They talked some more, and the boy said, “Are you going to try to get inside?”
“I can’t use a pick,” I said, “and I don’t have a key, but if the opportunity presented itself, who can say?”
They palavered some more. The kid said he’d need ten and another five to get through the lock.
I said, “Ten if we find the place. Do you know where it is?”
“No,” the boy said, “but Grandfather knows someone.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet he does.”
The old man cackled like a happy devil.
For the next hour or more, Grandfather, the boy, who was also Sam, and I weaved through the streets. The other Sam stayed at the shop. They walked so fast I had to work to stay with them. The old man kept turning around and waving his cane at me and repeating something that must have meant “Hurry up.” Three or four or five times, we stopped at a storefront where they went in and left me on the sidewalk to cool my thumbs and twiddle my heels. If I hadn’t done business with Sam before, I might have thought they were putting something over on me. I was familiar enough with most of the streets they led me down, and nobody looked like they were paying more attention to me than they needed to. I was seldom out of range of a radio for long. Seemed like everybody wanted to know what was going on in Washington.
I remember I was standing outside a busy chop-suey joint when I heard that bastard Roosevelt telling me that the only thing I had to fear was fear itself. What crap! I was not inspired.
When they came out of the last shop, a teahouse, I think, they were arguing. They kept their voices down, but I could tell they weren’t agreeing with each other. In the end, it seemed like the old man agreed with the kid.
Young Sam said, “We know where this place is. It’s not in the best neighborhood, but we ought to be all right in the middle of the day.”
“Sure, that’s fine.” It’s been my experience that in Chinatown, the later it gets, the better your chances of finding trouble, particularly if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s like that in most parts of New York, come to think of it.
“And we’ll have to pay,” he said.
“How much?”
“A dollar or two more, maybe three.”
I gave him three ones. The old man snatched the bills away from his hand, and we set off. It took maybe another twenty minutes on narrower streets, and through a big open market building filled with strung-up birds, smelly fish, butchered meat, and vegetables and other things I didn’t know. We went all the way through to the back where Grandfather talked to a Chinaman in a black suit. He was smoking a cigarette and leaning against a door. The old man slipped him a bill. The Chinaman didn’t look happy about me being there but let us through into an alley.
We followed it until we came to another guy. He got another dollar and let us through another door. That put us inside a building in a hallway. Until then, we’d been hurrying, but the old man motioned for us to slow down. I slipped the knucks on my right hand. The place might have been an apartment house or a rooming house. I could hear more radios through transoms but not the noises you get in a crowded place like Mother Moon’s or a tenement. The cooking smells sure weren’t the same either.
The old man led us to a door that opened onto a staircase, and the whispered argument with the kid started up again. The old man won that one. He pushed open the door, turned, and put a finger to his lips. We went slowly up narrow wooden steps. When the door closed behind us, it was almost completely dark and quiet. No more radios. We went up to the fifth floor where he pushed open a door to a short hall or landing with a freight elevator on one side and a metal door with three locks on the other. A dirty skylight overhead let in a little gray light.
The kid said, “Grandfather can open the door.”
“You’re sure this is the place I’m looking for?”
The boy translated, and the old man spat a lot of words back at him. Blushing, Sam said, “A white man with a beard rents the room. He pays more not to let anyone else in. He brings women here. No Chinese, only white women. Do you want him to open the door?”
“Is he going to break it in with his cane?” I asked, and the old guy’s eyebrows shot up. Yeah, I figured he knew English better than he let on, but I said to the kid, “Do these stairs go on up to the roof?”
They nodded.
“Okay, first we find out if there’s anybody inside.”
We went up two more flights to another heavy door that was locked. Sam said the o
ld guy could pick it for five. I told him to go ahead. There wasn’t enough light to see anything, but I guess he worked by touch. I could hear the scratches of him working with metal picks. Less than a minute later, the door popped and we were on a flat gravel and tar roof in the shadow of a wooden water tank on metal legs. There was a big square skylight right in front of us. The one we’d seen from below was a few feet away. Sam and the old man edged toward the big skylight. I looked around.
The roof we were on was taller than any of the ones around it. A cracked wooden chair was under the water tank. Dozens of stubby hand-rolled cigarette butts littered the gravel around it. Looked like somebody had spent time there.
The peaked skylight was made of panes of wired glass that were cleaner than the smaller skylight. The edges of the metal frame were softened by thick coats of paint. I could see a gear wheel and ratchet mechanism that would open the glass panels, but the chain that would open it was gone and the two biggest gears were padlocked together. Even if you broke through a single pane, you couldn’t open the skylight.
Down below us was Bobby’s studio.
It took the old man a lot longer to work through the three locks on Bobby’s door. I could tell that both he and Sam wanted to go inside, but I told them to wait outside. Hell, they’d done it enough times to me that day.
The loft was a lot like Bobby’s workroom in the Chelsea with a cluttered bench attached to one wall. It was piled with big light bulbs, electrical cables, and tools. Pinned up on the wall over it were the drawings Daphne told me about, jungle scenes of dinosaurs and Kong fighting. But the first thing I noticed, right in the middle of the room, was the big black hand the girl was on in the last picture in the book. It was made out of lumber and wire and covered with black canvas and matted carpeting.
