Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  He had taken his hat off and unfastened the very top button on his coat. The room was hot and she herself, laid up all day with an awful pain, had settled on the bed so he might have the chair in the corner that came with the faintest breeze. Wearily, she opened two buttons on her dress, buttons tacky to the touch with the awful thick in the air, and reached for her hand fan, the one he bought her at the curio shop on Pell Street.

  “I’ve walked this road before, my man,” she said to him. “I won’t walk it again without something more than a honey promise.”

  Over the past year, she’d said it to him ten, twenty times or more. And he’d always nod, even laugh, and never press the point. And that ease, the kindness in it—sometimes it brought heat under her eyes when she thought about it and she hated him for it. How dare he do that to her, bring that out in her when he’d yet to make money enough to put more than a paper fan from Chinatown in her cracked hand.

  He could hardly wait to get to her apartment that night. He ran the last seven blocks, crosstown. They had a date and he’d told her to wear her good dress, the one she called “Alice blue,” because they were going to celebrate something and he was taking her dancing. He wanted to see her twirl in that dress. He wanted to see her smile when she looked at him, which hadn’t happened in some time.

  But she wasn’t wearing the dress and didn’t want to go out. She felt sickly and had missed work and was worried she’d be dismissed. Her hip had started up again, a relentless throb. Four months back she’d been burned, the cook accidentally spattering hot sugar on her. When they tried to brush it off, the skin came with it. She missed two days of work and had been lucky to keep the job. But the hurt kept starting up again, twitching under her skin and then blazing by the end of a long day scrubbing, knees to the floor.

  He knew she must be feeling very poorly. Before, she’d never reclined on the bed in his presence, never even let him three steps past the doorway.

  Looking at her arranged there like a wilted flower, petals spread forlorn, he knew it would be an uphill battle, but he had much to tell her, much to make her understand. Everything had changed for him, for both of them, since the day before. He needed to make her see because it would mean he’d finally be worth her time, her closed-off heart

  There was a brightness in his eye that night, but she’d seen it before, on him, on other men. She’d long ago stopped letting the brightness spark off her. There was no dividend.

  “I want you to see it,” he was telling her. “I want you to see it like I did. Like seeing the face of God himself. You realize it’s been there all along. You just didn’t know how to look.”

  She turned away from him and remembered. Something long ago was visiting her, something from before he started calling, before any men started calling. She was standing, a long-limbed, long-necked eleven-year-old, before a large window display at Blumstein’s on 125th Street, a rippling row of summer dresses in every color—peacock blue, canary yellow, the deep orange of summer tea on a windowsill. It was as if they were moving in the June breeze, drifting on some clothesline, and if she reached out she could touch the soft linen.

  Finding herself struck by the memory of it, she forced herself back. “It’s just another policy game,” she said, shaking her head back and forth on the pillow. “That’s all you’re talking. There’s ten policy bankers in ten Harlem blocks and none of them making a slim dime anymore.”

  “This is different,” he said. “Let me show you how.” His voice like sugar on a spoon, crackling in her ear. “Let me show you.”

  * * *

  He’d been working at No. 37 Wall Street for almost a year, evening to sunrise, and had yet to see more than a handful of souls. All those gray-hatted, gray-faced men in their Arrow collars and polished brogues had long dispersed by the time he arrived, all off to some elegant drawing rooms in tall brownstones or Fifth Avenue apartments, in stately buildings dripping with white trim like wedding cakes, or to dinner at Sherry’s, Lobster Newberg, sweet bread in terrapin, jelly rubanée, and cigars, or train rides to homes on Long Island with stretches of lawn that seemed to end somewhere across the ocean.

  And there he’d be, in the empty husk they left behind each day, boot to bucket. But he never minded any of it.

  Nights, 2, 3 o’clock, he’d sit at one of the brokers’ desks, each night a different one, slippery walnut top, elbows on green felt, fingers spread on the ledgers. He’d sit there in his bleach-specked trousers, his worn work shirt. He’d sit there and he’d read. He’d read the newspapers, one by one, the Wall Street Journal, the Times, the Evening Journal, the Herald the World, the American, everything he could find. And he’d think. He’d wonder about the broker who sat there all day, probably ten or fifteen years younger, a seersucker-suited youth, lazy from summers in Newport, a winter’s month in St. Augustine. Did that man, that mere boy, know the hard majesty of numbers? Or did he stare dreamily out the window and ponder gossamer, the winsome heiress with whom he danced at the previous night’s Mayflower Ball?

  Well he, he wouldn’t waste a minute at that desk. And hell if he was going to do his reading in the janitor’s closet. He had a right to be at that desk. He knew none of those brokers saw the numbers float miraculous. Sometimes the digits felt so alive they were shimmering things he could roll across his knuckles like his granddad with his lucky gold piece.

  He never doubted his purpose, his reason for being there, for making the long way down to the tip of the island five days a week. After all, he’d been waiting a long time, since coming out of Boys High School in Brooklyn twenty years before. He’d worked as a bellhop, a short-order cook, four years in the Navy, near seven more as a hotel porter, and he could certainly push a mop on those fine marble floors a little while longer. To him, it was like a running leap. And if he ever felt a flicker of uncertainty, he’d pull a worn piece of paper from his pocket. Copied from a periodical, it read:

  Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.

  Because he had a plan he was working on and he could, with a pure heart, promise her that, if she would just wait a little longer, they’d both be gliding across their own marble floors by New Year’s and wouldn’t she like to be a June bride anyway?

  That night with her, the plan was no longer shimmering on the horizon. It was trapped in his belly and he could feel it when he laid his hand there, when he rested his hat over it.

  When she heard his news, he assured her, she would feel the pain soften and dissolve and she would want to put on her Alice-blue dress and tie a ribbon in her hair and be ready to dance all night, because everything had changed and he would tell her why.

  She almost didn’t want him to tell her. She knew how he could talk, first like butterflies flitting softly against her ear, and then, as the story, the idea, the promise would build, a music so lovely, so deep and bone-stirring, and then she’d have to work so hard to keep that hardness inside her. That tightness that had protected her for a year or more with this man, protected her from yet another disappointment—one man forgot to say he had a wife and newborn baby down in Baltimore, one man forgot to tell her he’d just signed up for a hitch in the Merchant Marines, one man forgot to say his mother wouldn’t like to see him with a colored woman on a public street. Or, worst of all, the ones who wanted to stay around but couldn’t—couldn’t hold a job, or got so beaten down by hard labor it was all they could do to keep from jumping off the Willis Avenue Bridge.

  Please don’t, she wanted to tell him now. But telling him even that would be showing him something, and she was determined to show him nothing.

  So she listened.

  He wouldn’t rush. He knew he had to take her through it step by step so she could experience it as he had.

  My girl, he said, it was just last night at old No. 37. Finished with floors five through fifteen. Every long corridor swept and mopped, every waste basket emptied, the candle-stick telephones polished, the st
anding ashtrays shaken out and filled with fresh sand. The smell of Dazzle bleach and carnauba wax heavy in the air.

  He was standing in the closet, pouring bleach down the sink drain.

  It came in a flash, his whole destiny flickering before his eyes, like a newsreel unspooling. A jittery image of himself, a Borsalino bowler on his head, Malacca walking stick in his hand, a topcoat of finest Italian wool, standing in an elegant drawing room with tall curtains and chandeliers. And pieces of gold, they were funneling down from the top edge of the screen, the ceiling, the sky, twirling like long sparkling ribbons in front of him and through his hands, his fingers, and to the carpet beneath him where it massed in enormous piles, a pirate’s booty out of a child’s picture book.

  It came to him like that.

  It was like St. Paul, wasn’t it, a mop standing in for a horse hoof. And standing there, he laughed like a drunken fool, teetering and spinning like a top because it was all there, waiting for him. He just had to take it.

  It was all the clearing house totals, you see. Published each day in the financial press.

  He’d kept the pages with each day’s totals in stacks tied with string. They sat in the corner of the basement next to the bags of salt. He’d kept them because he liked to watch the turn, the tilt, the romance of the rising and falling totals. He’d kept them for reasons he hadn’t known before but knew now.

  Carrying those papers, strings slipped over his fingers, he walked to the mahogany-walled warren of the floor’s head broker, Mr. Thornton, the one who proudly displayed a photograph of himself astride a powerful horse, polo mallet in hand.

  He sat at Mr. Thornton’s desk, pulled out a scratch pad and pencil, and went to work.

  He sat there, a pile of ginger nuts, a few stray cigarettes to fire his mind, paper and grease pencil in hand. He knew it would work, had known it back in that closet. But he wasn’t taking any chances. He would play with those numbers all night, making sure …

  * * *

  “I sat at that desk,” he told her now, “and time passed like two beats of my heart and then it was dawn. My hands covered with ink, dear lady, and I felt drunk as a preacher, and just like a preacher, kissed by God, because I knew. I knew.”

  When he told her this, she felt like she was fighting him off, heel of hand to chest, knees tucked high, and it was hard, because he looked lit from within, a Midas in a felt fedora with the voice of a soft-tongued minister with a pure, pure heart.

  Even as she fought, however, she felt the something tight inside her, the thing she kept fitted tight and compact inside her all day every day, start to loosen, the hard bolts that held it together giving way slowly and falling. And she hated this feeling because she knew the tightness and it kept her and it was all she had.

  When he talked, he used his hands, which were graceful, lithe, delicate, didn’t fit with his round face, his big barrel chest, his heavy lidded eyes. When he talked, he created pictures for her, with his hands, with his silver-toned voice, the way he kept his eyes on her and at the same time some imagined place over her left shoulder where, he assured them both, a shimmering future lay. A future beckoning them, artlessly.

  Once it was …

  Then it was …

  Now it would be …

  She looked at him, at his eager eyes flickering, daring her to come and join his dream like it wasn’t a dream at all but a thing you could lay your hands on and feel under each finger like the ropy filaments on a mop.

  The only thing that’s real, she kept telling herself, is the pain in my curved back. No, she wouldn’t join that dream. He hadn’t earned the right. Didn’t he know all that was real to her was her five dollars a week plus bus fare? Didn’t he see he’d have to put her hands on something more than a fancy man’s story to make it matter for her now? She was twenty-eight years old, twenty-eight years too old for the soft-tongued promises of handsome men leaning over her tired bed.

  It’s not enough anymore, she told him. It was once but not anymore. I have to be able to lay my hands on it. Can you do that for me? Can you make it real?

  I can, he said. My dear, I can.

  “So what did you figure out down there in that closet? A way to beat the bankers?” she said, forcing a toughness in her voice. “You think you’re going to make a fat pot on the stock market with your handful of dollars a week?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not playing the market, my girl. I’m makin a market.”

  “And what’s for sale in your market, my man? What are we buying?”

  “Same as Wall Street. A glimmer down the road.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t tell me you’re just talking about another numbers racket.” When she met him, he was a runner for a policy game, taking bets from hotel customers. “I don’t make time with racketeers.”

  He smiled and rose from his chair, walking to the edge of the bed. “It’s no racket. It’s honest as your furrowed brow, m’lady. It’s a true thing.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re just talking another numbers game, fat chances and day wages down. Bolita all over again,” she said, still shaking her head. She told him how her auntie had played every day for years, a penny down each morning and hit five dollars once in a blue moon. They drew the numbers at the cigar store, pulling numbered ball bearings from a sack behind the counter. Sometimes Auntie took her for the drawing and sometimes she was the one chosen to pluck the ball bearings from the soft muslin pouch that made her fingertips smell like sweet tobacco.

  When Auntie needed that operation on her neck to take out the swollen tumor the size of a large lemon, she had no money to pay for it. The charity hospital took her instead. Everyone said the doctor who removed it smelled like apple jack. She died the next morning, her face gray and frozen. She could picture her auntie’s face now, the awful way the skin pearled along the bones, like wax.

  Not three months later, word spread that the smiling cigar store owner had been rigging the numbers for years, palming duplicate ball bearings on days when it suited him. Before anything could happen, the store was shuttered up and he was long gone. Someone thought they spotted him on the platform at Pennsylvania Station, getting on a train to parts south.

  A lot of the bolita bankers closed up shop after that, one after another. “When I played the game, that lady was a virgin,” one of them said. “Now she is a whore.”

  He smiled when she told him this. He’d been hoping she would take him to just this point. It was what it was all about.

  He recalled his favorite teacher at Brooklyn Boys High School, dark-eyed, timid Mrs. Koplon, who stayed after school with him, who filled the blackboard with glorious clouds of numbers, the chalk dust swirling around their heads.

  And now he began talking softly, gently, just like Mrs. Koplon. Numbers aren’t just what you have or you don’t have in your pocket, bus fare or shoe-leathering it, steak on a fine plate or canned hash, he told her. Do you want to see what they can do? Because they have a power, my dear, if you let them work their witchery. Do you want to see what we can make them do?

  Of course she did. Of course. But she said nothing.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handfull of coins gathered from his second job, porter at the Hotel Walcott four days a week.

  He let them slip through his fingers onto the bedspread beside her. A penny, a nickel, a dime.

  The coins resting there, shimmering a little with each breath, each faint twist of her body as she raised it to see them better, to see his hands fluttering over them.

  He sat down on the bed beside her. She let him. This was something.

  “What are the odds, my girl? Tell me now. What are the odds you draw that shiny liberty-head?”

  “One in three,” she said, barely a whisper. “One in three.”

  “So you’d play?”

  “I’d play. Sure. I’d play.”

  “So in a three-digit number game, what are the odds of picking the right three numbers?”

  “
I don’t know. I don’t know that,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

  “You pick a four first. How many ways can you go wrong?” he asked, tender like the man at post office when she was small, the one with the whiskers who never made her wait in line, and together they counted. She lifted one finger to his, raised hands, fingers spread, and they counted.

  “Nine,” she said. “Nine,” she said again.

  “So pick your three numbers. What are your odds?” he repeated. Taking her hand in his, in the soft center of his palm, he spread three of her fingers over three coins.

  She let her fingertips graze the coins. Turning her body, she could feel the crisp edges of the sugar burns beneath the cool.

  “One in 999?” she ventured.

  He nodded, so pleased with her, this girl, pulled from school by her mother at age thirteen to go to work at the Loth Fair & Square Ribbon factory before it shut down.

  Reaching down, he lifted the newspaper that stood like a flag in his coat pocket. He held it folded in front of her and pointed to smudgy columns:

  Exchanges: $823,411,011

  Balances: $ 97,425,366

  With his grease pencil, he’d circled the 2 and 3 in the first figure and the 7 in the second figure.

  “The rules will be simple,” he said. “They’ll never change. The numbers in those three columns make up the number that pays that day. So today, it’d be 237. You play 237 and you hit it. The big time.”

  Pointing to the columns again, he said, “The totals create a random number each day, my girl. And it’s published in the daily papers everyday for all to see. Do you see how that changes everything?”

  “Because the game can’t be fixed,” she said, even as she tried to imagine a way it could. Tried to imagine a way to make him wrong. “You can’t rig the numbers.”

  My, was she fast. He knew she would be. It was why he’d waited so long for her.

  “That’s why this is different,” he said, but they both recognized what he was really saying: That’s why I’m different. “No drawing of numbers, no silky hands slipping favorites behind the counter. And you don’t need to spread the word about the winning number. You don’t need any operation at all except to collect and, when someone hits, pay out. I’ll pay 600-to-1 to those dear souls who hit.”