Loving Liberty Levine

by Colin Falconer

  “Wait, Sarah. Please.”

  She stopped and wheeled around. “Please go away. I have to get home.”

  “I’m not like Wilson,” he said.

  “And what is Wilson like?”

  “He only wants one thing.”

  “You want more than one thing? What other thing do you want? Only so many things I got.”

  “I know about your daughter, and I don’t care. In fact, I think it’s wonderful.”

  “What is wonderful?”

  “That you’re not just another good-time girl. That you’re looking after her.”

  “What else would I do?”

  “Come with me for a drink.”

  “What about Evie?”

  “Never mind about Evie. Just one drink.”

  She stood there trying to make up her mind, and while she hesitated, he took her arm, to protect her from being buffeted by the tide of people maybe. He was shorter than she was, and even the bespoke cut of that beautiful double-breasted suit couldn’t hide the potbelly. The steel-rimmed spectacles made him look old enough to be her father.

  Yet there was something else, something, well, almost boyish about how ardent he was in his pursuit, like a beau with his first crush. Well, she thought, why not?

  “One drink,” she said.

  He beamed at her.

  His car was waiting there at the curb, a powder-blue Bentley.

  No matter how long she’d lived in New York, how many times she’d walked up the fancy-schmancy stretches of Broadway, there was something about such millionaire cars. If you want to get from one end of town to the other, you catch a cab. But getting around town was not why these stage-door Johnnies had such automobiles and someone with leather gloves and a uniform to drive them.

  The shape of the fenders over the whitewalls, like a woman’s hip lying on a chaise; the gleam of the paint like marble in a palace. Such a car is like the lamp in the Aladdin story, she thought. Rub the coachwork, and its master could make a girl’s dreams come true.

  She climbed in.

  They didn’t drive downtown to Greenwich this time. Dewey told his driver to head for the One-Thirties. She’d heard some of the girls talk about Jungle Alley, but she’d never been up there. When she heard where they were going, she felt a thrill of excitement despite herself. It was like she was going to a foreign country.

  North of the Park the avenues seemed broader, and the brownstones didn’t hug the sidewalks as tight as they did downtown. There were a lot more schvartzes in the street too, standing around the street corners, outside basement speakeasies with red awnings over the doors. Suddenly they were in the Alley, and there were shiny Franklins and Pontiacs parked bumper-to-bumper along the curbs, just like Broadway.

  “Have you been up this way before?” Dewey said to her. His eyes were shining. Somewhere on the way uptown, he’d changed. He didn’t look like a banker anymore.

  She shook her head. “No, I never been.”

  “It swings to beat all hell up here.” He leaned forward and slid aside the glass partition. “Stop here, Nelson.”

  It wasn’t like any speakeasy she’d been to before. At the Red Hen and the other clubs in the Village, the only schvartzes were playing on stage; here, she saw them sitting in the dark, drinking and smoking along with the whites from Midtown. Dewey led her to a table with a checkered tablecloth, near the back.

  A torchy-voiced singer, sweat gleaming on her skin like molasses under the lights, was urging her lover to “take your time with what you do, make me cry for more of you.” She was accompanied by a Brylcreemed mulatto with a pencil-thin moustache and sweat-stained white jacket, playing a beat-up upright. The back of the piano was missing; she could see the hammers moving. Somehow, he made the old eighty-eight sound like an entire orchestra.

  Dewey the banker spread his arms over the back of the chairs either side of him and looked right at home. He ordered two top-to-bottom cocktails and took a silver cigarette case from his coat jacket. “You look—I have insufficient superlatives.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You like it here?”

  He put a cigarette between his lips and lit it. It looked different from a store-bought cigarette, like he’d rolled it himself. The smoke had an acrid, slightly sweet smell to it.

  “Marijuana,” he said. “Nelson gets them for me. Two for twenty-five cents. Better than bathtub gin and a lot cheaper.”

  “That a millionaire type like you should worry about money.”

  “A banker always watches his bottom line.”

  This was a different Dewey, she thought, without his pal Wilson there watching him. She looked around the club. There was a cop sitting in the corner, still in his uniform, eating fried chicken and waffles. A waiter came over and put a beer and a brown envelope on the table next to his elbow. The cop took a deep swallow of the beer, wiped the froth off his moustache with the back of his hand, and slid the envelope into his pocket.

  Next to him two schvartzes in spats and loud ties were tapping their feet in time with the music. The piano player was playing solo now, pounding out a barrelhouse ragtime.

  “Never imagined you in such a place,” Sarah said.

  “Nobody is everything they seem to be,” he said. He blew a stream of blue-gray smoke toward the ceiling and grinned at her.

  Their drinks arrived. Sarah took a sip at hers and winced. This is why Dewey prefers his marijuana cigarettes, she thought. Such cocktails could clear a drain in a slaughterhouse. She shuffled hers to the side.

  She looked around, nodded toward a man sitting in a dark corner. He looked to her like a gorilla squeezed into a double-breasted suit. He had a fancy girl with him, in a too-short skirt.

  “You know him?” Dewey asked her.

  “Sure, got a pushcart on Hester Street. He sells hats.”

  “That’s Umberto Valenti. He’s a shooter for one of the Italian mobs.”

  “Then why he sells hats?”

  Dewey laughed and shook his head.

  “Thinks he’s tough. Tell him he should try selling hats on the Lower East Side. Look at the girl. Got more crust on her than a piroshki. I can see her tushy before she even sits down. I’m ashamed for her, and I show my tush professionally.”

  Dewey shook his head. “Jesus Christ, quit staring. I’m not kidding, that guy she’s with kills people for a living.”

  “I always wondered, do they charge by the bullet or by the pound?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And you tell everyone you’re a banker.”

  He was an easy guy to talk to, and he didn’t look at her in the hungry way, like Wilson did. He was content to schmooze. They talked about entertainment things, about Gloria Swanson and Babe Ruth, and then later, because she asked him, he told her his life story.

  Which was this: He was from Boston, he said. He went to the same prep school as his father, and the same university, Brown. When he graduated, he went to work with his father in the family firm on Wall Street. When his father died, Dewey inherited the same desk and the same secretary; though in a break with tradition, he didn’t sleep with her on Wednesday afternoons like his old man did. The older members of the firm saw it almost as an act of rebellion.

  “You must be real smart to be so big-time,” Sarah said.

  Dewey shook his head. “Just lucky I was born in the right clan. Having the right family, that makes all the difference in life.”

  Sarah reached for her cocktail.

  “I thought you didn’t like the drinks here,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  Dewey kept talking. “The old man said that when they were handing out the brains, I was selling the tickets at the door, which was fine with him. Told me the only books a man ever needed to read were the accounts ledgers and his Bible. I left a bookmark on page three of Genesis when I was eleven years old and never got back to it. These days the only thing I ever read start-to-finish is ticker tape.”

  He had a hunting lodge in th
e Adirondacks, he said, an apartment in the West One Hundreds, and what he described as a weekend shack on Long Island.

  He finished his cigarette. He leaned back in his chair, glassy eyed, tapping his feet in rhythm with the ragtime.

  “What is it you do at your papa’s firm?” Sarah said to him.

  “Actually, it was my great-granddaddy’s firm. He was the smart one.” Dewey polished his glasses on his paisley-patterned silk vest. “Brokerage. We deal in government bonds and public stocks and some handpicked financial securities.”

  “I see your lips move, but what I hear is jibber-jabber. What does a girl like me know from banking. Explain me.”

  “Well, I help people buy a little bit of a company. When that company does well, they can sell their bit of the company for a bit more or use the profit they made to buy a part of another company.”

  “I thought you were a bank. You sound like you sell saucepans door-to-door.”

  He laughed. “Nobody else would dare say it to me, but between you and me, that’s exactly what I do. Only I’m the kind of salesman where the customer puts his foot in my door, not the other way around. You got to have a lot of money before I can sell you something.”

  “So you own a fancy pushcart where rich people come to buy more money.”

  “I guess.”

  “That’s a very nice business you got.”

  “Well, my granddaddy thought so. That’s why he gave it to my old man. Now you know all about me, and I don’t know a thing about you.”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “Well, you sure you didn’t grow up in New York?”

  “I grew up in Russia. You know Russia? It’s like winter, only it lasts all year.”

  “Is that where you started in show business?”

  She laughed. “Show business. You mean where I first started to show my business? Sure, it was at the Winter Palace. You think the czar didn’t like a little tushy on the side?”

  “Hey, I don’t want Jewish theater. The truth.”

  “The truth?” For the truth, she thought, I need a drink. She dared another sip at the cocktail. It made her eyes water. “Dewey, let me tell you. I didn’t have no hunting lodge, no shack for Shabbas. I grew up in a village not much bigger than this basement. My father railed at God every day for giving him four baby girls and no sons living. Before I came to America, I knew from milking a cow and selling potatoes and a little bit of tailoring, nothing else. I did what my vati said and what Elohim said and my husband told me. And you know what? They all let me down. There, that’s the truth.”

  “Did you come to America with your husband?”

  “Sure, I did. I didn’t have no choice. He says you come. I come.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died and went to Jewish heaven.”

  “How?”

  Another gulp of the gin and wine. The room started to spin. “Got himself shot in the war. A war he didn’t have to go to, never mind. Left me with little Libby.”

  “You’re still angry about that.”

  “He gives me my precious daughter, then he goes away himself, and what for? For nothing. Sure, I’m angry. But what you going to do? Nothing you can do.”

  “Where is your daughter now?”

  “My daughter? She’s at home.”

  “On her own?”

  “Got a good friend who sees after her. My friend, she has a husband and five kids, and she says, ‘What is one more?’ I pay her to look out for my Libby until I get home. What else am I going to do, without a husband?” Listen to me, she thought. Why is he still sitting here with me? I don’t even sound to myself like someone I want to know. The drink was making her talk too much. She grabbed her Saks handbag and stood up. “You got to excuse me. I have to powder my nose.”

  They were two-deep at the washbasins in the ladies’ powder room. A girl in a flapper dress came out of one of the cubicles, unsteady on her feet with white powder on her nose. Most of the other girls in there looked like gangster molls to Sarah: too much lipstick, not enough skirt. But what am I to judge. I take off my clothes for money and leave my little girl home on her own every night.

  “Is that Bill Dewey you’re with?” one of the girls said to her, addressing her in the mirror.

  Sarah nodded.

  “How did you hook him? He doesn’t even want it when it’s free.”

  “You know him?”

  “Not in the biblical sense,” the girl said, “but I tried. They say he’s loaded.”

  “He’s only like the bank of America,” another girl said on the other side.

  When she got back to her table, Dewey had just lit his second cigarette. His red-and-yellow foulard was loose, and there was cigarette ash on his white linen shirt. He had his feet up on the empty chair. He gave her a lazy smile.

  “I got to go home,” she said.

  “So early?”

  “I got to look out for my little girl.”

  “I’ll get Nelson to drop you off.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll get a cab.”

  He laughed again. “I’ll be at the show tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up afterward.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “I got to ask you. Why me, Dewey?”

  “That’s a big question after one bathtub gin.”

  “Lot of showgirls Ziegfeld has, most of them easier than me. I’m twenty-six years old, I got a nine-year-old kid. I got inconveniences, like your friend said.”

  “Well, Sarah, let me tell you something. When people look at me, they see what they want to see. My guess is you feel the same way.”

  She shrugged.

  “You see? We have a lot more in common than you think. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  25

  Two Months Later

  George Seabrook hurried along Broadway. He heard faint organ music as he crossed onto Wall by the Trinity Church. Gulls wheeled over the dark Gothic spire above, their seabird cries out of place here on Wall Street. He didn’t come down to the city very often, and it was years since he had been down the money end of Manhattan. There was something corrupt about it, he thought; it wasn’t where the honest dollars were made.

  He passed the massive edifice of the National City Bank, with its soaring marble columns. The buildings on the street looked more like fortresses than banks to him. He spared a glance for the limousines parked outside The Corner, their liveried chauffeurs buffing the coachwork of the Rolls-Royces and Bentleys at the curb. A lay preacher on a podium draped with Old Glory and crude and gaudy pictures from the Bible harangued him as Seabrook walked past.

  Dewey was sitting in a booth at the window of a diner at the other end of the street. Damn the man, he could have thought of a hundred better places to meet. It was oppressive inside, not even any fans to move the air.

  Dewey grinned when he saw him. “George! Great to see you.”

  “You too, Billy,” he said, and they shook hands.

  George sat down, put his homburg on the table. “Thought we’d be eating at one of your fancy clubs.”

  “They’re so stuffy,” Dewey said, and nodded to the waitress, who brought them two coffees. “I prefer this place. There’s less eavesdropping.”

  “Why, are you going to be telling me trade secrets?”

  “No, just one of my own.”

  George raised an eyebrow, but Dewey just shrugged and smiled. All in good time with Dewey.

  “So,” Dewey said, “what brings you to Sodom and Gomorrah?”

  “I’m thinking of investing. An import-export company, textiles mainly. The pup who runs it is a damned fool. I knew his old man, and he was a different stripe. His boy has practically run the business into the dirt, so I’ve made him an offer. He’d be crazy not to take it.”

  “Import-export. Branching out? Not like you, George.”

  “It’s that or retire, and I’m a little young for that.”

  “Why don’
t you invest in the market? You could make a lot of money with the right advice.”

  “I’ll leave the market to people who know about these things.”

  “Knowing about these things is how I built my business.”

  “Thanks, but I like to see what I’m buying. Fooling around with bits of paper, that’s not for me.”

  George could smell coffee, the real thing, not the mud they were drinking. It was coming from a group of men in suits behind them.

  Dewey leaned in. “Coffee importers. Their house is a few doors down. Like fish, you can’t get the smell of it out of your clothes, they say.”

  “Like the smell of money.”

  Dewey grinned.

  “Haven’t seen you for a while, Billy.”

  “I don’t get back to Boston very often these days.”

  “It looks like New York agrees with you.”

  Dewey patted his belly. “I have a cook. Stole her from the Doorans. They were miffed with me for a while.”

  “So, what have you been doing?”

  “This and that.” He lowered his voice, though as far as George could tell, no one was paying them the slightest attention. “Thing is, I’m thinking of getting hitched.”

  “At your age?”

  “Comes to all of us sooner or later.”

  “I thought you were married to the bank.”

  “You should never mistake an arrangement for a marriage.”

  “Who’s the lucky girl?”

  “You won’t know her.”

  “Interesting. What’s her name?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Sarah . . . ?”

  “Levine. Sarah Levine.”

  “You’re right, I don’t know any Levines.” George raised an eyebrow. “Jewish?”

  “Hmm.”

  “And that’s not going to be a problem?”

  “Nothing we can’t sort out.”

  “Where are her family from?”

  “Russia.”

  “Yes, of course. But where did they make their money?”

  Dewey sat back, a wry smile on his face. “She doesn’t have any.”

  “Any what? Money or family?”