“Yes, your Majesty.” His lordship backed reluctantly away.
What an interesting study in alchemy, thought Pilbeam, that with the Queen the base metal of his lordship’s manner was transmuted to gold. “Your Majesty. My Lord.” Pilbeam reversed himself across the floor and out the door, which Martin contrived to open behind his back. Lord Robert followed close upon their heels, his boots stepping as lightly and briskly as the hooves of a thoroughbred.
A few moments later Pilbeam stood in the street, an inspiringly heavy purse in his hand, allowing himself a sigh of relief—ah, the free air was sweet, all was well that ended well . . . . Martin stepped into a puddle, splashing the rank brew of rainwater and sewage onto the hem of Pilbeam’s robe.
Pilbeam availed himself yet again of Martin’s convenient handle. “You rank pottle-deep measle! You rude-growing toad!” he exclaimed, and guided the lad down the street toward the warmth and peace of home.
The Night of Their Lives
MAX ALLAN COLLINS
I spent the first week in the shantytown near the Thirty-first Street Bridge, nestled in Slaughter’s Run. The Run was a non-sequitur in the city, a sooty, barren gully just northeast of downtown. For local merchants it was a festering eyesore—particularly the ramshackle Hoovervilles clustered here and there, mostly near the several bridges that allowed civilization passage over this sunken stretch of wilderness.
For men—and women—down on their luck, as so many were in these hard times, the Run was a godsend. Smack dab in the middle of the city, here were wide open spaces where you could hunt wild game—pigeons, squirrels, wild dogs, and the delicacy of the day: Hoover hog, also known as jackrabbit.
In the Thirty-first Street Jungle, a world of corrugated metal and tar paper and tin cans, I met “former” every-things: college professor, stock broker, haberdasher, and lots of steel mill workers, laid off in this “goddamn Depression.” I don’t know that I ever heard the latter word without the former attached.
Saddest to me were the families—particularly the women who were alone, their husbands having hopped the rails leaving them to raise a passel of dirty-faced, tattered kids. A ragamuffin-laden woman, even an attractive one, was unlikely to find a mate in this packing-crate purgatory.
Since Thursday of last week I’d been wandering the streets near the Central Market, where hobos haunted the rubbish bins. The weather was pleasant enough: a cool late April with occasional showers and lots of sunshine. I hadn’t shaved the whole time; I wore a denim work shirt, brown raggedy cotton trousers, and shoes with holes in the soles covered by cardboard insteps. My “home” was a discarded packing crate in an alley off Freemont Avenue, behind a warehouse, in the heart of the city’s skid row district.
When I talked the chief into letting me take this undercover assignment, he’d suggested I take my .38 Police Special along. I said no. All I’d need was a few personal items, in my canvas kit bag. I never went anywhere without my kit bag.
“It’s a good idea,” the chief had said. He was a heavyset, bald, grizzled man who spoke around an ever-present stogie, frozen permanently in the left corner of his mouth. “As just another hobo, you can gain some trust . . . we can’t get this riff-raff to cooperate, when we haul ’em in on rousts. But they might talk to another bum.”
“That’s the theory,” I said, nodding.
Of course, if I told the chief my real theory, he’d have fitted me for a suit that buttoned up the back—you know the kind: where you can’t scratch yourself because your arms are strapped in?
It had been three weeks since the last body had been found. The total was at eleven—always men, dismembered “with surgical precision,” whose limbs turned up here and there, washed up on a riverbank, floating in a sewage drainage pool, wrapped in newspaper in an alley, scattered in the weeds of the Run itself. Several heads were missing. So was damn near every drop of blood from each victim’s jigsaw-puzzle corpse.
Because the butcher’s prey was the faceless, homeless rabble washed up on the shores of this Depression, it took a long time for the city to give a damn. But the Slaughter Run Butcher was approaching an even dozen now, and that was enough to interest not just the police, but the press and the public.
The mission at Fourth and Freemont was always crowded—unlike a lot of soup kitchens, they didn’t require you to pay for your supper by sitting through a hell-and-damnation sermon. In fact, I never saw anybody seated in the pews of the little chapel room off the dining hall, although occasionally you saw somebody sleeping it off in there; the minister was a mousy guy with white hair and a thin black mustache. He didn’t seem to do much beside mill around, touching bums on the shoulder, saying, “Bless you my son.”
The person who really seemed to be in charge was this dark-haired society dame—Rebecca Radclau. If the gossip columns were correct, Miss Radclau was funding the Fourth Street Mission. Though schooled in America, she was said to be of European blood—her late father was royalty, a count it was rumored—and the family fortune was made in munitions.
Or so the society sob sisters said. They also followed the moviestar lovely Miss Radclau to various social functions—balls, ballet, theater, opera, particularly fund-raisers for the local Relief Association. She was the queen of local night life, on the weekends.
But on weeknights, this socially conscious socialite spent her time dressed in a gray nurse’s-type uniform with a white apron, her long black hair up in a bun, standing behind the table ladling bowls of soup for the unfortunate faceless men who paraded before her.
Even in the dowdy, matronly attire, she was a knockout. The soup was good—tomato and rice, delicately spiced—but her slender, topheavy shape, and her delicate, catlike features, were the draw. Men would hold out their soup bowls and stare at her pale face, hypnotized by its beauty, and grin like schoolboys when she bestowed her thin red smile like a blessing.
“I’d like a piece of that,” the guy in front of me in line said. He was rail thin with a white stubbly beard and rheumy eyes.
“She seems friendly enough,” I said. “Why not give it a try?”
“She don’t fraternize,” the guy behind me said. He was short, skinny, and bright-eyed, with a full beard.
“Bull,” the first guy said, “shit.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I seen her and Harry Toomis get in her fancy limo out back . . . it comes and picks her up, you know, midnight on the dot, every night, uniformed driver and the works.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Anyway, I seen the night Harry Toomis got in the limo with her, and she was hanging on ’em like a cheap suit of clothes.”
The other guy’s expression turned puzzled in the maze of his beard. “Say—whatever happened to Harry? I ain’t seen him in weeks!”
Somebody behind him said, “I heard he hopped the rails, over to Philly. Steel mills out there are hiring again, word is.”
We were close to the food table, where I picked up a generous hunk of bread and took an empty wooden bowl; soon I was handing it toward the dark-haired vision in white apron and gray dress, and she smiled like a madonna as she filled it.
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was low, warm; no accent.
“I feel I’ve known you forever.”
She looked at me hard; her almond-shaped eyes were a deep brown that approached black—it was as if she had only pupils, no irises.
“You seem familiar to me as well,” she said melodically.
“Hey, come on!” the guy behind me said. “Other people want to eat, too, ya know!”
Others joined in. “Yeah! This goddamn Depression’ll be over before we get fed!” I smiled at her and shrugged, and she smiled warmly and shrugged, too, and I moved on.
I sat at a bench at one of the long tables and sipped my soup. When I was finished, I waited until the food line had been shut down for the evening, then found my way back to her.
> “Need some help in the kitchen?” I asked, helping her with one handle of the big metal soup basin.
“We have some volunteers already,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow night?”
“Any night you like,” I said, and tried to layer it with as much meaning as possible.
Then I touched her hand as it gripped the basin; hers was cool, mine was hot.
“I wasn’t always a tramp,” I said. “I was somebody you might have danced with, at a cotillion. Maybe we did dance. Under the stars one night? Maybe that’s where I know you from.”
“Please . . . ” she began. Her brow was knit. Confusion? Embarrassment?
Interest?
“I’m sorry to be so forward,” I said. “It’s just . . . I haven’t seen a woman so beautiful, so cultured, in a very long time. Forgive me.”
And I silently helped her into the kitchen with the basin, turned, and went out of the mission.
The night sky was brilliant with stars; a full moon cast an ivory glow upon skid row, giving it an unreal beauty. An arty photograph, or perhaps a watercolor or an oil in a gallery, might have captured this landscape of abstract beauty and abject poverty. Rebecca Radclau might have admired such a work of art, on her social travels.
From around a corner, I watched as her dark-windowed limousine arrived at midnight, pulling into the alleyway where an impossibly tall, improbably burly chauffeur stepped out and opened the door for her. She was still wearing the dowdy gray uniform of her missionary duties. A sister of mercy.
She was alone.
She slipped into the back of the limo, her uniformed gorilla of a driver shut her inside, and they backed out into the street and glided away into the ivory-washed night.
Perhaps I’d misjudged her.
Or perhaps tonight she just wasn’t thirsty . . .
For the next two nights I worked in the kitchen, washing the wooden soup bowls the first night, drying them the next—and there were a lot of goddamn bowls to wash and dry. She would move through the small, steamy kitchen as if floating, attending to the next night’s menu with the portly little man who was the cook for the mission, and in her employ.
Rumor had it he’d been the chef at a top local hotel that had gone under in ’29. Certainly the delicately seasoned soups we’d been eating indicated a finer hand than you might expect at a skid-row soup kitchen.
I would catch her eye, if possible. She would hesitate, our gazes would lock, and I would smile, just a little. She remained impassive. I didn’t want to push it: I didn’t repeat my soliloquy of the first night, nor did I add to it, or present a variation, either. I tried to talk to her with my eyes. That was a language I felt sure she was easily fluent in.
The next night, as I went through the soup line, she said, “We won’t need you in the kitchen tonight,” rather coldly I thought, and I went to one of the long tables, sat, sipped my soup, thinking. Damn! I screwed up. Came on too strong. She needed to think she was selecting me.
And just as this thought had passed, I felt a hand on my shoulder: hers.
I looked up and she was barely smiling; her catlike eyes sparkled.
“How was your soup?”
I turned sideways and she loomed over me. “Dandy,” I said. “I never see you trying any. Don’t you like the company?”
“I never eat . . . soup.”
“It’s pretty good, you know. Rich enough even for your blood, I’d think. Want to sit down?”
“No. No. I never fraternize.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“I just wanted to thank you for your help.” And she smiled in a tight, businesslike way. Others were watching us, and when she extended her slender fingers toward me, and I took them, we seemed to be shaking hands in an equally businesslike way.
Nobody but me noticed the tiny slip of paper she’d passed me.
And I didn’t look at it until I was outside, ducked into my alley home.
Midnight, it said.
Written in a flowing, lush hand. No further instructions. No signature.
But I knew where to be.
She stepped out of the back door of the alley, looking glamorous despite the dowdy uniform being damp with sweat and steam, black tendrils drifting down into her face from the pile of pinned-up hair. The whites of her eyes were large as she took in the alley, looking for me, I supposed. She seemed perplexed.
When the limousine glided into the alley next to the mission, and the tall burly chauffeur got out to let her in, I stepped from the recess of a doorway, kit bag in hand, and said “You did mean midnight, tonight?”
She jumped as if I’d said “boo.”
She touched her generous chest. “You startled me! When I didn’t see you, I thought you’d misunderstood . . . or just stood me up.”
I went to her; took her hand and bent from the waist and kissed her hand, saying archly, “Stand up a lovely lady like yourself? Pshaw.”
I’d always wanted to say “Pshaw,” but it never came up before.
She smiled slyly, a thin smile that settled in one pretty dimple of her high-cheekboned face. “Did you think this was a date?”
“I had hoped.”
“Mister . . . what is your name?”
“Jones, or Smith, or something. Is it important?”
“Let’s make it Smith-Jones, then.”
“Sure! That’s high-tone enough. And may I call you Rebecca?”
“I prefer Becky.”
“All right.”
The chauffeur was standing with the limo’s rear door open. His face was shadowed by his visor, but I could make out a firm jaw and a bucketlike skull.
“Let’s not stand out here talking,” she said, suddenly glancing about, almost furtively.
“Why not? You’re not mistaking a member of the Smith-Jones clan for the sort of riff-raff you don’t care to be seen with?”
“Please get in. What is that you have there?”
“Just my old kit bag. I don’t go anywhere without my old kit bag—it contains what few possessions I still have.”
“Fine. But do please get in.”
The chauffeur moved forward, and I had the feeling that if I didn’t get in, he’d toss me there.
“Ladies first,” I said, bowing, gesturing, and she quickly ducked in.
I followed. The leather seats smelled new; they were deep and comfortable—like living-room furniture, not the backseat of a car.
“Mr. Smith-Jones, I wanted to express my gratitude to you, this evening.”
She was unpinning the black hair; it fell in cascades to her shoulders. She shook her head and it shimmered and brushed her shoulders, flipping up at the bottom.
“Gratitude?” I asked. “For what?”
“For your help, these last several days.”
“In the kitchen? Jeez, lady . . . Rebecca . . . Becky . . . it’s only fair. You’ve been always good to guys like me, down on their luck, making sure we get a square meal once in a while.”
“I’ve known adversity myself,” she said solemnly. It sounded silly, but I managed not to laugh.
“So . . . uh . . . how exactly do you intend to express your gratitude?”
She touched my hand; she looked at me with those iris-less dark eyes. She seemed about to say something provocative, something sensual, something seductive. What she said was: “Food.”
“Food?”
“Food. Real food. A real meal. Prepared by a five-star chef.”
“No kidding. I had something else in mind . . . ” I grinned at her lecherously, and she just smiled. “ . . . but I’ll settle.”
She didn’t let it go. “What else did you have in mind, Mr. Smith-Jones?”
I sighed. Looked down at my tattered clothes. Shook my head. “I shouldn’t even kid about it. How can you look at somebody like me . . . unshaven . . . dirty clothes . . . breath that would knock a buzzard off a dung wagon . . . and think of me in any other way but one of pity?”
She patted my hand. “That’s not necessar
ily true, Mr. Smith-Jones. I can look at you and see . . . possibilities. I can see the man you were—the man you still are, underneath the bad luck and the hard times.”
“That’s kind of you to say.”
Her cool hand grasped mine. “And I don’t think your breath is bad at all . . . I think it smells sweet . . . like night-blooming jasmine . . . ”
She leaned forward; her thin but beautiful lips parted—they were scarlet, but I wasn’t sure she was wearing lip rouge—and she touched her lips to mine, delicately. Then she touched my unshaven cheek with the slender, long-nailed fingers of one hand and stared soulfully at me.
“You’re a fine man, Mr. Smith-Jones. We’re going to clean you up . . . a bath . . . a shave . . . an incredible meal. You’re going to have the night of your life . . . ”
The Radclau mansion was a modern brick castle beyond a black wrought-iron gate; three massive stories, its turreted shape rose against the clear night sky in sharp silhouette, the moon poised above and to the right as if placed there for the sole purpose of lighting this imposing structure.
“This is really something,” I said. “When was this built?”
“Just a few years ago,” she said.
We were around the side of the building now, gliding into a garage which opened automatically for us—whether the chauffeur triggered it somehow, or someone inside saw us coming and lifted the drawbridge, I couldn’t say.
“I recruited one of the top local architects to build something modern that would evoke my family home,” she said.
“Where was the family home?”
“Europe.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down much.”
“Just a little corner of eastern Europe. You probably wouldn’t even have heard of it.”
Maybe I would have.
We stepped from the cement cavern of the four-car garage into a wine cellar passageway that led to an elevator.
“I was never in a private home that had an elevator,” I told her; the leather strap of my canvas kit bag was tight in my hand. The chauffeur—whose bucketlike skull turned out to have two dead eyes, a misshapen nose, and grim line of a mouth stuck on it—was playing elevator operator for us.
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