The Girls at the Kingfisher Club

by Genevieve Valentine

  “ ‘Don’t drink with the customers or I’ll fire you,’ ” Henry recited.

  “Timeless words.”

  He raised a bottle. “You want one?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  The room had its own momentum; it was too late to call it off. The doors were going to open whether she stood here or not.

  But she had been terrified the first time she took the others out, and terrified the first time the cops descended, and terrified the first time she realized Tom was never coming back.

  Terror didn’t matter; only that you stood your ground.

  She nodded to Ames, who struck up a gentle waltz, and the bouncer at the door (McGee, Jo remembered) opened the door, and the guests began to trickle in.

  If she was fighting not to gnaw off her nails until the room had two hundred people in it; she thought that was only fair for a first-timer.

  If she looked at every face in case it was a sister, she tried not to mind it. Either they were smart enough to stay away, or she might get one or two back safe again.

  • • •

  On the third day, someone told their alderman that Tom had disappeared, and a girl was in charge.

  When McGee summoned her, she came downstairs and saw the alderman’s lieutenant (Parker, McGee had told her) waiting at a table, a bottle of their finest whiskey open in front of him with a couple of rounds already knocked out, and Henry behind the bar, polishing the same glass over and over.

  Parker had a broad face and sharp blue eyes and the expression of a man who got his own way.

  Still, the stakes here were lower than any time she’d been summoned to her father’s office.

  She took a seat.

  “Strange that Tom never mentioned he was going to skip town,” he said by way of introduction.

  “That is strange,” she said. “That doesn’t suggest you’re in his confidence much.”

  “He and I were discussing prices before he left.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “The cost of doing business has gone up.”

  She didn’t answer. He frowned.

  “I’m here for my money.”

  Why this seemed familiar, she couldn’t say. She’d never had any money worth fighting for, until now.

  “Well,” she said, “I doubt you see much of it. Bosses have a way of walking off with the profits if there are any—have you noticed that? I mean, Tom pays me fair, but I bet sometimes you look at the money you’re carrying home and just wish.”

  Parker snarled. “I get paid fine. A damn sight more than you do, I bet.”

  She changed tactics. “No doubt,” she said. “Glad to hear your boss isn’t hurting for money, then.”

  “I’m here for what Tom promised.”

  “He’s not here for the next little while,” she said. “You want a deal, you’ll have to strike it with me.”

  “I don’t do business with women.”

  She suddenly recognized what was so familiar about being here.

  This was how her father did business.

  She could do this. She knew how to herd someone who had to ask you for something. She knew the lure of unknown resources to someone who was desperately guessing.

  She folded her arms. “Maybe not with your clothes on, but I’m sure you can adjust.”

  “You keep giving me lip and I’m going to teach you a lesson,” he said.

  “You can try it,” she said, “and then you can see what contingency plans Tom left me with. He knows the oddest people, in offices you wouldn’t expect.”

  He froze halfway to a word.

  She smiled. (She held it until it softened—it was time to back off the challenges and get him on a path out the door.)

  “Didn’t Tom ever mention that police protection costs the kind of money that eats a man’s livelihood?”

  “We never—”

  “And this is a generous place,” she said. “He’s been looking out for your alderman every week, and he told me to look out for you, too. Your alderman charges a fair price, he told me. I want to believe that’s true. We all try to take care of our own.”

  She sat forward, arms crossed.

  “What, exactly, was your alderman looking for?”

  “Three hundred more a week.”

  She laughed quietly, gave him the look of a man to his fellow soldier in the trenches.

  “I can’t pay that and our supplier,” she said. “I don’t want to give up doing either—being safe is less exciting with only second-rate gin—but I just don’t have it. I don’t have half that.”

  Parker’s face had lost its dangerous edge. “I’m under orders.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Me too.”

  She paused, like she was thinking it over. “I can give you two hundred more, to start with,” she said. “And when Tom hears how fair you’ve been, I’m sure he’ll agree.”

  She smiled just shy of kindly, as the sidelong warning sank in.

  “Of course,” he said vaguely.

  “Wonderful,” she said, letting her smile get bigger, genuine. “Listen, I have to start putting my curl papers in, but I hope you’ll come by tonight? I’ll keep the rest of this bottle behind the bar, and you can go right to Henry there for anything you need. Have you ever been here at night?”

  “No,” he said, “never made it.”

  “Well, if you can get away from the boss, you should. This bandstand is the bee’s knees, and it’s the least the alderman can do, making you do the rounds before the fun starts. I’ll tell McGee. Come by around eleven. We’ll be expecting you.”

  Parker stood up with his hat in his hand, looking slightly concussed, and said with the air of someone who suspects a trap he can’t see, “I’ll present your offer to the alderman.”

  That was less than reassuring, but she’d take a respite; a respite meant another round of negotiation—another shot at winning.

  “Wonderful,” she said again, and gave him a firm handshake on his way out. He looked a little concerned, a little glazed, and too late, Jo wondered if he’d brought a weapon.

  The door closed behind him.

  Jo rested a hand on the table for balance.

  Henry came up beside her, the whiskey bottle in his hand.

  “Holy hell,” he said. “I thought you were bluffing before about Marlowe willing you the gig, but he picked the right man for the job. Those are decent tricks.”

  “I’m my father’s daughter,” said Jo.

  • • •

  That night, as the crowd filed in, she felt as though she’d lost something.

  She checked inventory, but they were stocked. The bandstand showed up on time. Even Parker showed up close to midnight, in the same suit and a nicer tie.

  (She sat him at a table close to the dance floor on the far side of the room from the bar. A man who was dancing all night was a man who wasn’t keeping a close eye on volume.)

  Four times, she checked in with the boys at the door to see if they’d felt that any of the newcomers were plainclothes constables.

  It was near closing when she realized it was Lou she had been looking for.

  It was Lou, because for the last twenty years, if Jo had done something, terrible or not, Lou heard it first.

  Jo had been trying to tell Lou, all night.

  • • •

  She went into the basement, took heavy breaths in the darkness for three minutes until it felt less like she was going to cave in.

  They won’t be there when you go back upstairs, she told herself sternly. Get ahold of this. They aren’t there, and you have a business to run, and you have to pull yourself together.

  (I’ve failed them all, she thought, and her throat closed tight. I marshaled them because I could, and now they’re gone and there’s nothing I can do, and
that’s the reason that when I go back upstairs, everyone is going to be a stranger.

  I’m my father’s daughter, she thought, and she wanted Lou beside her, to lie and say it wasn’t so.)

  • • •

  What really killed Jo about the Marquee was watching the crowd dancing every night.

  What killed her was her old, unbreakable habit of looking for sisters who weren’t there.

  She was relieved, most of the time, once she’d thought it over calmly.

  (She needed to think about it calmly once or twice a night, whenever the band struck up “Charleston Baby of Mine,” and she was flooded with the memory of them scrambling for the dance floor, Hattie and Mattie skipping at the front of the line with their arms already over their heads, and Jo had to blink carefully for a second until her eyes were clear.)

  It was for the best that they had scattered. If any of them ever showed up at the Marquee, it would be because they had run into trouble everywhere else and were willing to seek sanctuary in a place they’d been to only twice.

  As long as they were elsewhere in the world, then Jo could imagine that all ten of them had made it out all right and were enjoying their freedom in daylight hours, at long last.

  She hoped it was true. She liked to imagine them as a flock that made their way through the city and came to roost at sundown, together and happy.

  (Dance had only ever been meant as a way for them to pass the time, until the worst was over and they could surface. Jo hadn’t known, back then, how long the worst would last.)

  But even as she tried to believe they had all landed on their feet—they were clever, and the world couldn’t be any worse on them than their father had been—there was always the chance that something had gone wrong.

  There was always the gnawing fear that none of them would ever come here again, because one way or another, their father had gotten hold of them.

  That’s what killed Jo.

  twenty-three

  Some of These Days

  Jo called Three Willows one afternoon, asking if it was possible to speak to “Miss Hamilton.”

  It was not. Staff were not permitted to discuss patients of the institution.

  “I’m Mr. Hamilton’s secretary,” she tried, but whether he had warned the staff about it or their policies simply forbade it, it got her nothing, except a request to come in and make the request in person, if she was willing.

  (She was not.)

  • • •

  “Henry,” she asked one afternoon as they were setting up, “if you had a sister and she had to run away, where would you want her to hole up?”

  “Back home,” Henry said.

  “Not helpful.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a big city. You can hide anywhere. A hotel, I suppose, if she had the money. Maybe boardinghouses, though they don’t give out names to strangers.”

  “How long would it take to go to them all?”

  Henry laughed like she’d been joking, and after a second, she smiled as if she really had been.

  • • •

  At the end of her first week, a representative of the New York Police Department stopped by the Marquee to inspect operations and pick up the milk money.

  Jo had worried that she wouldn’t recognize an off-duty cop in this crowd—so many men looked edgy when they were underground.

  But when he appeared, Jo looked up and saw him and took the stairs smiling.

  “Officer Carson!”

  “Sergeant.”

  “Congratulations, then,” Jo said. “I remember when you were still manning the drunk tank and being kind to young ladies who had no one to call. You’ve moved up in the world.”

  Recognition dawned on his face, and he smiled.

  “So have you,” he said. He frowned, then said a moment later, “I mean, I hope.”

  Jo laughed, took his arm, and escorted him to the bar.

  She had no desire to discuss the past or the present with a cop (any cop, just in case), but it was good to cultivate kind people—you never knew when your alderman was going to turn sour and you would need a friend on the inside to let you know before the worst happened.

  But the milk money was behind the bar anyway, and it was just good business to make sure no valuable associate left still thirsty.

  • • •

  She never moved out of the empty studio above the Marquee where she’d spent her only night with Tom.

  That one she tried not to think about; you can’t worry about everything, and she’d manage if it meant free room and board.

  Not that she was sleeping much. As things turned out, it was impossible to sleep well when you were used to eleven sisters around you, the floorboards and bed frames and rustling blankets making a little symphony that let you know you weren’t alone.

  • • •

  Luckily, she was used to getting by on little sleep (who would have guessed her attic life had prepared her so well for employment of ill repute?).

  She was also used to spotting trouble just before it started, and putting out fires in short order.

  Once she saw a man who was getting too fresh for her liking, and she’d crossed the floor before she’d thought about it.

  “Who made you chaperone?” a guy asked, when she tapped him on the shoulder and told him to get his hands off the lady and get out.

  “She did,” Jo said. “Leave before I make you.”

  The girl was Elsie.

  Jo didn’t realize until she was closer. Then she looked twice.

  She must have been staring; when Elsie said “Thanks,” she looked as nervous as she had with the handsy fella.

  Jo started to ask if her mother knew she was out on the town. But she wasn’t anyone’s general anymore, and people had reasons for coming out nights.

  She only said, “Grab a drink at the bar. Tell him it’s on me.”

  She wiped her palms on her dress (left two wet spots near her hips), tried to shake it off.

  On her way to her office, Mr. Parker stopped her.

  “Didn’t realize you were running a boardinghouse,” he said.

  She half-smiled. “Sure thing,” she said. “I’m going out for a cig. If anyone else gets handsy, you just tell them to leave room for the Holy Spirit until I get back.”

  He watched her go.

  Outside, she looked up at the sky through the halo of the streetlights out in front.

  It was calm, and cooler here than inside with the press of bodies, and it was easier to sort things through.

  There was no harm in what she’d done. She had a business to run and couldn’t go getting sentimental, but all the same, no woman in this dance hall would get less than she’d given her sisters.

  Maybe someone was doing the same for Rebecca, somewhere, for the sake of this girl that she looked like.

  • • •

  Jo stopped drinking.

  She started standing at the corner of Thirty-Eighth after the workshops let out, to scan faces.

  She started wearing black gloves at night.

  “I wish you’d tell me what the matter is,” Henry said, once. It was afternoon, and in the daylight he looked even younger, as blond and guileless as a prince in a play.

  “If wishes were horses,” she told him.

  He raised an eyebrow, said, “We’re low on champagne.” A little hesitation after it, some word he didn’t fill.

  (One of her sisters must have talked to Henry about her; whenever he was impatient with her, he called her General.)

  • • •

  After dark, it felt like some magic kept the worst of the world at bay, and she was able to forget everything except the flow of the music, and the flow of the dance floor, and the flow of booze, and she presided over a room full of strangers every night.

  She saw girls who looked
like her sisters. Every time a baby vamp came in with a dark bob and bright red lips and a string of fake pearls down her front, Jo checked twice, just to make sure it wasn’t one of the twins.

  Every time it wasn’t, she had to take a breath.

  Be clever, she thought, all the time, like the words flew out the door and into the streets. Be cleverer than your sister was.

  • • •

  A few days later, Jo went to the post office near her old home (it was already her old home—it was somewhere she had lived a lifetime ago) and, as Mr. Hamilton’s private secretary, asked to see if there was any word from Lou.

  The man at the teller’s window looked at Jo a moment too long, asked too sweetly if Jo would wait just a moment before he disappeared.

  Jo knew by now what it sounded like when someone was going to turn you in.

  She vanished.

  • • •

  It was her father’s best move yet, that he’d thought to warn even the post office against any stray women asking for letters. That little revenge cut her more than she’d thought he even could.

  (They had been at war, and she hadn’t realized; they’d been at war, and he was winning.)

  More than the idea that her sisters had run off in little knots and were working together to stay well, more than the idea that she was alone, it kept her awake at night to think that Lou might be trying to send some word or to beg for help and would never be answered.

  Three pairs of shoes were lined along an empty wall.

  • • •

  After two weeks, Jo was wrapped up enough in her work that she could sometimes ignore the familiar knot in her stomach as long as the dance floor was moving smoothly and no one stood out more than the rest, as if the rise and fall of each bandstand set was a metronome she could time her worries to.

  (The waltz didn’t bother her much. Every Charleston, she ached.)

  Sophie’s white knight from the Kingfisher, Mr. Walton, made an appearance that week.

  Jo must have been more of a cipher than she’d thought, because she greeted him and guided him all the way to a table, and it was only when she asked what he was drinking that he recognized her.