The Wicked City

by Beatriz Williams

  “We ain’t cozy, Gin. Not like that.”

  “But you maintain some kind of understanding betwixt you, nonetheless.”

  “Don’t ask me that. You know I hate to lie to you.”

  “I’m not asking you a thing. I’m stating a fact. You know all about how she works for the Bureau, don’t you, and everything that goes down here goes down on her say-so. Isn’t that right? In exchange for a little official protection, which is something a joint like this stands in need of, during these desperate times.”

  Christopher glances at the door. Glances back to me.

  “That’s right. Tell me the truth, now. Nobody can hear you. Why, you don’t ever need to make a sound, in any case. Just nod your head yes if I’m onto something. If what I say sounds familiar.”

  He fixes me in the eye and makes a small nod yes.

  “Good. And as for that bastard Anson—”

  But I am not allowed to inquire after Anson, it seems. Not because Christopher’s disinclined to continue this interesting conversation—though I expect he right enough is—but because the door does swing open wide at that exact second, and a man staggers into the room, skull cracked open like an egg, orbitals swollen fit to burst. He sways, stumbles, catches himself on a chair. Stares at me like he knows me, like he’s been searching for me all his life.

  “Why, Carl Green!” I cry, starting forward from my stool.

  “Get going,” Carl says, like a man with no teeth. He spits something out, or rather dribbles some piece of something from his lips. “Get on out-a here, Geneva Rose,” and he pitches right forward, over the seat of the chair, and bleeds himself dry all over Christopher’s nice clean floor of checkerboard tile. Black and white and red all over.

  7

  AND I am kneeling there on the tiles over Carl Green’s body, yelling for more dishcloths, cradling his poor split-open skull, when that bastard Anson strides in from the back hall and makes a noise of anguish.

  “You! What the hell are you doing here? Get on out, do you hear me? Get on out before I take up a stool and bash you where—”

  He steps forward and snatches my arm. “Come along, Gin. Right now!”

  “I ain’t going nowhere! Don’t you see what you done to him?”

  “Come on!”

  “You get your hands off-a me! He’s a-dying, can’t you see?”

  “He’s a dead man, Gin! You can’t help him.”

  “He ain’t dead, he’s alive, he wants saving—”

  A pair of hands closes around my shoulders and lifts me upward and into the chest of Oliver Anson.

  “You do as he says, Gin Kelly,” says Christopher. “You get the hell out of here now!”

  I’m no match for the two of them, and anyway there’s this mad urgency packed into Christopher’s voice—a voice so ordinarily laconic it couldn’t possibly care less about my troubles—that stuns me into acquiescence. The blood-soaked dishcloth drops from my right hand, while Anson’s paw clamps around my left hand. I stagger after him, eyes kind of blurry, head kind of light, down the back hallway and through that door in the broom closet. Up the narrow, wet brick staircase and into the courtyard that smells of garbage, where Anson scales a wall as nimbly as a six-foot squirrel and lifts me after him, over the top, scraping my knees on the rough edge and then landing on the pavement, stumble-thud.

  “Wait!” I gasp. “My pocketbook!”

  “Christ, Gin! Let’s go!”

  I want to scream No, I want to plant my feet and wrest my arm away, but Anson’s bicep is eight sizes bigger than mine, his strength is insurmountable, and instead of making my stand I clatter along in his lee, down a narrow alley and into a street, I don’t know which one, where a black motorcar sits by itself in the shadow betwixt two street lamps.

  “No! Are you out of your mind? Ain’t getting inside any kind of automobile with you—”

  Anson just bends down and hauls me up into his arms like you would haul a sack of grain, like you would haul a barrel of moonshine, and he turns the handle and kicks open the door and dumps me into the seat. Levers himself over me and starts the motorcar so fast, roars from the curb so fast I don’t have time to unscramble myself and open the door. I just set to swearing at him. Pummel his arm as I turn the air a bright shade of Appalachia blue. He sets his teeth and pays me no mind. Just drives down one wet street and another, round a mess of corners until we squeal to a stop somewhere in the Manhattan gloom. And he sets the brake and grabs my wrists and says, “Now, you calm down, Gin, you calm down one minute. What the devil’s wrong with you?”

  “You bastard! I know what you are, that’s what’s wrong. You are no more Prohi than I am, that’s what’s wrong.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Millie did!”

  “Who the devil’s Millie?”

  “The blonde, you bastard! The stinking blond vamp from Christopher’s joint. Met me today at lunchtime and told me to look up your offices on Tenth Avenue, and there was sure enough nobody there, because I am a damn fool and trusted you—”

  “Damn,” he says, and lets go of my wrists.

  And I am not so shocked by Anson’s use of the word damn that I can’t now spring forth from the automobile and sprint down the cobbles for some kind of freedom, though he catches me in seconds and says, whispers, right in my ear: “Well, you’ve got to trust me now, Gin, you’ve got to come with me now or you’re next.”

  “Next for what?”

  “Next for dead. Next for having your skull split open like that poor fellow back on Christopher Street.”

  “By whom?”

  “By Kelly, that’s who.”

  I strain against his arms and he lets me go, without warning, such that I lurch forward until he just saves me by the elbow.

  “You were right about that fellow the other night,” he says. “I should have listened. You were right.”

  “I’m always right. Except about you.”

  He swears again. “I’ll explain. Just come with me now, all right? Just let me get you somewhere safe.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not really.”

  A cold rain falls upon us, somewhere between a drizzle and a mist, and I realize I’ve got no coat, either. No coat and no pocketbook. No gloves nor hat. We’ve landed near the docks, I can smell it in the air, salt and fish and oil and rust and rot, the flavor of maritime commerce. The steam drifts from my lungs and his, dissolving together into the gloaming. Some kind of hullaballoo sounds from a nearby street, but it seems to belong to another world entirely. A world of people going about ordinary business, people whose skulls stand in no danger of bashing. Anson’s hand is warm and snug around my elbow. His heart beats a few inches away. I start to shiver.

  “Come on, Gin. You’re cold. Let’s get out of here.”

  I close my eyes and Carl Green’s head appears before me. The contents of his skull, leaching out onto a nice clean black-and-white floor.

  “I’m going to kill him,” I say. “I’m going to kill him with my bare hands.”

  And the thing about Anson is, he doesn’t have to ask me whom I mean. Just lets his hand fall from my elbow and says, kind of soft and yet so hard and straight as a steel rail: “You don’t have to kill him, Gin. You have me for that.”

  8

  NOW WE are spurting out past the Narrows, white wake trailing from behind us, aboard some boat that Anson magically unmoored from a dark, rotting dock not far from where the ocean liners fill with coal and stores. The rain’s blown out, the moon bursts free. The draft freezes my cheeks. He’s wrapped me in some kind of blanket, pulled from beneath the seat behind me, but that doesn’t stop the shivering, which derives from a source far beneath my skin.

  “Are you all right?” he asks at last, over the noise of the motor.

  “Course I am.”

  “You’re still shivering.”

  “It’s a cold night.”

  He says something under his breath and starts to maneuver his co
at from his shoulders, switching the wheel from one hand to another.

  “Don’t bother,” I say. “You’ll freeze to death in this draft.”

  “So will you.”

  “So I’ll find another blanket. You just stay put and keep us on top of the water, all right?”

  He exhales and nods over his shoulder. “Under the seats. With the life belts.”

  I bend down on my shaky knees and poke around underneath the seats, until I find a stack of wool plaid blankets identical to the one I’m already wearing. The boat pitches violently; I sprawl on the slatted wooden deck.

  “Sorry!” calls Anson. “Keep hold. Crossing a wake.”

  Another wild pitch, and another. I brace myself against a seat until the jolting settles back into what I suppose is the ordinary rhythm of a small, sleek motorboat skimming across a calm sea. Not that I’ve ever had the pleasure. My stomach lurches in time to the swell. I set my hands on the edge of the hull and lever myself up, clutching the blanket under my arm, and then I stagger back to where Anson steers the thing, one hand on the chromium wheel and one hand on some kind of throttle, like he was born to do such things.

  “Sorry,” he says again. “You’re all right?”

  “You might have warned me.”

  “If I’d seen it in time, I would have. You weren’t hurt, were you?”

  I unfold the blanket and lift it over my shoulders, atop the first one. “I’ll live.”

  “Seasick?”

  “Now, why would you ask a thing like that?”

  “Because I don’t want to see your dinner all over my clean deck.”

  “Don’t worry. No dinner here. Just a ham sandwich and a dry martini.”

  He doesn’t answer. The boat skips happily along the black water, while the moon strikes a silver path before us. Nearby, a few dark spots suggest other ships, and I guess if I look hard enough, I can distinguish their shapes by the meager light of the night sky. But I don’t want to look. I stare dumbly ahead, listening to the drone of the engine, smelling the brine and the gasoline exhaust. Trying not to think, trying not to blink, because each time I close my eyes, I see Carl Green’s head spilling onto the floor. His blood the color of wine. Brains the color of jelly.

  “How much farther?” I sort of choke.

  “Far enough. You should sit down. Just sit down and hold on to something.”

  I sink into the passenger’s chair, made of oiled, salt-stained leather. The sea ahead disappears from sight, hidden by the long wooden bow. I watch the glimmer of moon on the polished wood. Hear myself asking whose boat this is.

  He answers me with some kind of reluctance. “My father’s.”

  “Does he know we’re borrowing it?”

  “He won’t care, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “And just why does your father keep a motorboat tied up on the Hudson River?”

  “He doesn’t. I brought it in myself.”

  “From where?”

  “From where we’re going.”

  “Which is?”

  “Don’t ask so many questions, Gin. I’m just doing what I have to do. Once I realized we had a leak—”

  “Millie?”

  He pauses. “No, not her. I’ll explain later.”

  “No. I want you to explain now.”

  Anson heaves a sigh so deep, I imagine I can hear it above the noise of the motor and the water slapping our sides. I turn my gaze to his fingers, gloved in leather, wrapped around the throttle, and the moonlit hairs at his wrist. My stomach falls and falls. He pulls on the throttle, and the entire boat seems to rear up like a damn stallion, and I thought we were going fast before, but now we’re racing. Tearing across all that black water. I clutch at the side of the boat and find a handle right there, just for the purpose of keeping your body anchored to the seat. They think of everything, rich people. I clutch this thin metal bar with one hand and the blankets with the other. My eyes sting. The tears stream out across my temples. I think, Wouldn’t it be lovely just to race and race along the track of the moon, Anson silent by my side, wind freezing my lungs. Salt spray dashing like needles into my cheeks. Race on forever, no shore in sight.

  Inevitably, the boat slows. Makes a long, graceful curve to the right. Anson’s hand eases the throttle to a low putter, and the great thrust below my feet dies away into a kind of drifting.

  “What are those lights, ahead of us? The shore?”

  “No,” he says. “That’s Rum Row.”

  “Rum Row?”

  He reaches for my arm and pulls me gently to my feet. Points all the way to the right and then across our front, in a long arc, all the way to the left. An endless string of lights, like somebody’s hosting a midnight party in a giant garden.

  “Ships,” he says. “Anchored six miles out from shore, where the legal jurisdiction of the United States ends. They’re full of liquor, Miss Kelly. Like floating warehouses. You and I, in our motorboat, if we wanted a case or two of genuine Scotch whiskey, we’d sail out to meet one of those ships and shout up for what we wanted. And they’d sell it to us. And we’d hurry back to shore, before the Coast Guard could catch us.”

  “You don’t say. As easy as that?”

  “More or less. Depending on the state of the weather. Of course, most of the boats taking advantage of this service are bigger fry than a man and a woman searching for a drink. The New York rackets, the gangs who keep the clubs and the speakeasies running.”

  “And my stepfather? Where does he fit in?”

  “I suppose you might say that Duke Kelly’s organization finds itself in something of a competition with the ships of Rum Row. Imported liquor against the native variety. But New York’s so thirsty, it doesn’t really matter. There’s room for everyone, you might say, if nobody decides to get greedy. Everybody sticks to their territory.”

  I stare out at the string of twinkling lights. What an innocent beauty; what a fairy show. “This line of ships, how far north does it go?”

  “Up Long Island and Massachusetts. Down south along the New Jersey coast. Maryland, Delaware. All the way to Florida, with some breaks in between. Like a sort of blockade, I guess, only the opposite direction. Bringing goods in instead of keeping them out.”

  “Then why doesn’t the Bureau just sail out and arrest them?”

  “Can’t. It’s perfectly legal, what they’re doing. International waters. It’s the motorboats we try to stop—the Coast Guard does, that is—except we haven’t enough boats and men and guns.”

  “We?”

  He makes a little movement, as if catching himself. Rests one wrist on the top of the wheel. The casing of his watch glints softly by the light of the moon.

  “Well? Which is it? Are you a genuine Bureau agent, or not?”

  “Not at present.”

  “Not at present. You quit?”

  “They fired me. Two months ago. Two and a half. Just before Christmas.”

  I whistle softly. “So Millie’s right. Hand in the cookie jar, was it? And I thought you were such an honest fellow. What happened? Gambling debt you couldn’t convince Papa to cover?”

  His hand moves against the wheel. He curls his fingers around the lacquered wood, making a fist. “No. I guess you might say I was sniffing too close to somebody else’s cookie jar. That’s what I surmise, in any case. I was working on the Kelly racket, as I told you, trying to follow the trail of money, and they called me into the office one morning and told me they had evidence I was taking bribes. Photographic evidence, paper evidence. I remember his face. Shevlin’s face; he’s the head of the New York bureau. I could tell it was killing him. He’s a good man. But he had his orders.”

  I turn to face his profile, lit by the moon. “His orders? Are you trying to tell me this entire affair—my stepfather—are you saying it goes all the way up to the top?”

  “I don’t know about the top. Higher than Shevlin, certainly. It seems your stepfather’s got a protector of some kind. One prepared to do just about an
ything to keep his name clear and his bank account fed.”

  He stands erect, Mr. Anson, his spine so straight as a rail of steel track, so straight as an arrow from Robin Hood’s own bow. Shoulders thick and level. One hand fisted around the ship’s wheel. Eyes narrowed into the distance.

  “And I imagine that’s where I came in, isn’t it? You wanted to find out who this protector might be. You cast about. You discovered Duke Kelly’s own baby girl lived right there conveniently on your doorstep, right there in Manhattan, just waiting to be plucked up and fashioned into a doll of your own using. Some kind of puppet, some marionette with her strings all in a heap—”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Am I? Explain to me, then, how you couldn’t just tell me the truth from the beginning. Why you had to put on such a hoax, just to get me to play along.”

  “For exactly that reason. You wouldn’t have believed me. Even if you did, you wouldn’t have thought it worth your while, a slim chance like that, without the Bureau behind me.”

  “Ah, so it isn’t worth my while. There’s not a thing you really can do to Duke, is there? I’m just the stakes in your little poker match. No, that’s not it. I’m the stooge. The dumb stooge holding the bag when—”

  “You’re not a stooge, for God’s sake. You’re not any of those things.”

  “Then what am I? Tell me! What the hell am I to you, Oliver Anson?”

  He lifts his right hand and does something to the throttle, I don’t know what, kills the motor entirely. The sudden absence of manufactured noise unnerves me. The slap of water against the hull. He turns in my direction, and his face is all shadowed and bony. His eyes are the same color as the moon, except hotter.

  I swing to my feet and push my chin up to match his. “Well? When you staked me out—isn’t that the word?—when you watched me and followed me and made yourself an expert on Ginger Kelly and her squalid little life, what was your angle? What were you thinking?”