The Wicked City: A stunning love story set in the roaring twenties

by Beatriz Williams

  “A gentleman left this for you, first thing this morning.” (She renders the word gentleman inside a heavy skillet of irony.)

  “How kind. Thank you terribly, Mrs. Washington.”

  “And another thing. You were making a real racket the other night, Miss Kelly. A real racket.”

  “Was I? A thousand apologies. I must have been talking in my sleep.”

  “I thought I heard a man’s voice, in there with you.”

  “A man’s voice? But that’s altogether impossible, Mrs. Washington! Why, you know very well I received no gentleman callers last night. What do you think, I’ve got them shimmying up the drainpipe?”

  “I know what I heard.”

  “How very strange. Are you certain? What was he talking about, this fellow you think you heard?”

  “Something about Harvard, Miss Kelly.”

  “Harvard! You mean that college in Massachusetts?”

  “And Pinkerton guards.”

  “Pinkerton guards and Harvard! Now, that’s salacious. I don’t wonder you were shocked.”

  “It’s what I heard! As if you didn’t know.”

  “Mrs. Washington, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid I haven’t got time to wonder at your fertile imagination just now. Due at work any minute. But if this kind of thing goes on, hearing imaginary voices in the middle of the night, I think maybe you should see a doctor.” I tuck the envelope into my pocketbook and turn for the door. “They’ve got miraculous pills these days, take care of all your troubles.”

  “Miss Kelly—”

  But I’m afraid to say I let the door fall shut on the rest of that sentence. Wasn’t going anywhere useful, was it?

  20

  ACCORDING TO the instructions inside the envelope, I’m supposed to deliver the sordid contents to a fellow named Macduff at some address on Broad Street at a quarter past twelve o’clock this afternoon. Macduff, I think. Lord Almighty. There goes my lunch break.

  But when I arrive at said address at a few minutes prior to the appointed time, the place turns out to be a luncheonette, all cheap and new and white painted, trimmed in chromium steel, windows turning back the glare of the winter sun. You know the spot. Perched on the corner, hot soup for a nickel. When I open the door, a gust of steam rushes out into the street, smelling of grease and cigarettes.

  Inside, the waitresses scurry. It’s a young, lowly crowd, the kind that can’t afford a nice juicy beefsteak at Delmonico’s, stenographers and clerks and typists like me, hair bobbed and lipstick fading fast, suit jackets wilting in the artificial heat. The chatter comes fast and hard as the clickety-clack racket of a typing pool. I take hold of a passing waitress and ask her if she happens to know the whereabouts of a fellow named Macduff.

  “Macduff?” she asks, harried. As in, You putting me on, sister?

  “That’s right. Mr. Macduff.”

  “Never heard of him. Go look for yourself.”

  She pulls her arm away, and as she’s balancing four bowls of boiling soup on a small wooden tray, I allow her the privilege. Around me, the tables are filled, scarce an empty chair, and surely no crisp-suited gentleman who might or might not be on the lookout for a companion from behind a newspaper or something. Likewise, the dozen stools at the lunch counter stand occupied, except for a seat at the end now draped by somebody’s lumpy charcoal overcoat. I make for the gap and tap its neighbor on the shoulder. “Pardon me. Do you mind removing your—”

  A porcelain face turns up toward mine, so bare and plain I might not have recognized it, except for a single platinum curl dipping beneath the rim of a cloche hat to touch the arch of a perfect eyebrow.

  “Not at all,” she says.

  21

  I SETTLE ON the stool and take out a cigarette. “Macduff?”

  “It’s easy to remember.”

  “Millicent. Macduff. I don’t suppose you happen to have a genuine moniker, do you? Something your mama used to call you.”

  She lifts her coffee. “It’s not important.”

  “Suit yourself.” I signal for the counter attendant and make my hand like a cup of coffee. “So what’s a nice girl like you doing mixed up in a business like this?”

  “I might ask the same of you.”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I need the dough.”

  “I doubt it. You’ve already got a nice little income, haven’t you? Smiling for the camera.”

  “Not anymore. I quit the indecency business yesterday.”

  “Oh? For what reason?”

  “For one thing, the money’s better in the bribery racket. Do you want your envelope now, or do we enjoy a nice civilized lunch first?”

  She stubs out the last of her cigarette. “There’s nothing in the envelope. Just blank paper.”

  “Oh? And how do you know that?”

  “Because I sent it to you myself.”

  I swear. The coffee arrives in a clatter. I reach for Millie’s cream and sugar.

  “Aren’t you going to ask why?” she says.

  “I’m waiting for you to start. I reckon you’ve got something to say to me, don’t you? That’s why we’re here.”

  Millie makes a noise of maybe assent and extracts another cigarette from the silver case reclining against her saucer. Her fingers are long and nimble and bony, her nails varnished in crimson. But it’s her face that fascinates me. The change in her. Unpainted, she looks all faded and monochrome, even her eyelashes, like somebody unplugged a drain beneath her chin and emptied her of color. She lights the gasper and enjoys a long, pensive drag, and by the time she pauses to consider the pattern of smoke curling forth from her lips, I’ve more or less run out of both coffee and patience.

  “Well? What’s the news? I haven’t got all afternoon.”

  “You sure like to cut to the chase, don’t you, Miss Kelly?”

  “So would you, if you were due back at the typing pool in thirty-eight minutes, or else. A ham sandwich and a cup of tomato soup, please,” I tell the counter attendant, who’s just returned with the cream and sugar I don’t need. He nods and turns away. From behind us comes a crash of china, a brief vacuum of silence, a trill of laughter. The resumption of clickety-clack chatter. “Let’s begin with you, Miss Macduff. Since we have to start somewhere. Just who’s pulling your strings? My stepfather?”

  “Goodness, no. What an idea. I’m with the Prohibition bureau, sweetheart.”

  “No kidding. You and Anson, together?”

  “No,” she says. “Just me.”

  I set down my cup and pluck the end of my cigarette from the ashtray, holding it betwixt my thumb and my forefinger while a large gray crumb breaks away and crashes into the porcelain. “You don’t say.”

  “Oh, I do say.”

  “Then I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “My dear girl. Don’t you see? You’ve been tricked. You’ve been bamboozled. Our dear Mr. Anson doesn’t work for the government. He’s in business for himself.”

  “Get lost. What kind of rube do you think I am?”

  “Look, I don’t blame you for falling for him. I’ll bet he took you to his office, didn’t he, made it look all official. Fed you the best story in the world. But the truth is, he was kicked out of the New York City agency a few months ago.”

  “Baloney.”

  “No, it’s true. He was on the take, see. Feathering a nice little nest for himself.”

  I laugh. “Now I know you’re feeding me a line. Anson on the take. I never saw a straighter arrow than that one, and I know from scoundrels, believe me.”

  “Look. I’m not going to waste my breath. I just wanted to warn you, that’s all. He’s not what he seems. It’s all a front, see.”

  The ham sandwich slides into place before me. The soup in its cup, steam rising, butter melting to a small, speckled yellow pool in the center. I glance up to thank the counter boy, and he’s giving me a strange look, brows all bent.

  “Everything all right, miss?” he asks.

  “Just fine,
thanks.”

  “Look,” says Millie, “you just think about it, all right?”

  “I don’t need to think about it. For one thing, why isn’t he in jail? If he was caught on the take, like you say.”

  “Because he’s got mighty friends, sweetheart, mighty friends. The kind of friends even the Bureau doesn’t dare to cross. You don’t think he came from nowhere, do you? So they kicked him out, but they couldn’t throw the book at him, and they didn’t. And when Duke Kelly asked him to bring you in, why, he was more than happy to oblige in exchange for a cut of the action—”

  “Says you. Didn’t he pick me up from the police station? After that raid on Christopher’s. You saw everything, you were right in that cell with me. Say, I’ll bet it’s all the other way around, isn’t it? I’ll bet you’re the rat working the double-cross. Staked out the joint, called in the raid. Or else maybe you’re trying to rat out Anson, because he raided your daddy’s joint and hauled you off to jail—”

  “What, me and Christopher? You think we have a thing together?” She laughs. “Look, I guess you’ve got no reason to believe a word out of my mouth. That’s fair. I’m working my own angle, and maybe I should be glad it’s got you fooled, a smart girl like you. One thing’s for sure, I shouldn’t be here right now, wasting my time, blowing my cover like a silly fool, on account of I’ve got a soft heart and hate to see another girl wander into trouble like this. But that’s what he does, you know. Fucking Anson. If I had a nickel for all the girls he’s taken in, that square jaw and those thick shoulders, all the girls who think he’s a fine upstanding fellow just about made of virtue—”

  I snatch my pocketbook from the countertop and hunt for a dollar bill. My fingers are trembling, my ears roaring. The brown envelope keeps getting in the way, so thick as it is. I pull the damned thing free and toss it in Millie’s lap, and the roll of bills appears at last, wedged in the bottom next to the rip in the lining. I strip away an ace and lay it on the counter, crumpled greenback against bright new aquamarine blue. The ham sandwich sits untouched on the plate, turning my stomach.

  “Keep the change,” I say. “And go to hell.”

  She shrugs. “Fine, then. Have it your way. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Oh, you warned me, all right. And trust me, I’ll be passing along this interesting information right where it belongs.”

  “You do that. See what he says. Although you might want to start by visiting those offices of his on Tenth Avenue.” She stubs out her cigarette in the ashtray and inspects my ham sandwich. “I’d love to know what you find there.”

  22

  I’M NOT the least bit inclined to follow Millie Macduff’s advice. For one thing, I’m due back at the typing pool in—check watch—twenty-seven minutes, and for seconds, who wants to give the dame that kind of satisfaction?

  On the other hand. Here I am, striding not toward the familiar corner of Wall and Broad but southwestward, toward the Battery, tossing my cigarette stub on the cold pavement and fishing for a nickel in my jacket pocket. What do you know.

  I tell myself, as I inhale the sharp, sunlit atmosphere and listen for the telltale sing of the elevated tracks, that I’m making this journey out of caution, not suspicion. I’ve got to warn Anson about this Millicent Macduff: warn him in person, not over the telephone to some kind of doll who might or might not be the kind of doll you can trust. And maybe he’ll be sitting at his desk and maybe he won’t, who knows, but the urgency of the situation demands my best efforts, does it not? I owe him that much for saving my life. For almost kissing me in my bedroom last night, I mean on the forehead like a gentleman, when he might have claimed any reward he wanted, and what fellow kisses a willing girl on the forehead in the privacy of her own bedroom, unless he’s an honorable fellow and he’s maybe a little in love with her? So Anson’s a fellow I can rely on, and Miss Macduff is made of rotten phonus balonus, and by the time I’ve spilled off the train at Twenty-Third Street and descended to the hubbub of Ninth Avenue, I can just about taste the indignation at the back of my throat: sort of like the homemade variety of gin, only more sour.

  By now it’s almost one o’clock, and I should be sliding into place before my typewriter this exact second, tucking gloves and hat into the drawer and straightening my collar for the benefit of Miss Atkins’s patience. Quite possibly I’ll lose my job over this little whim, unless that praying mantis upstairs sees fit to protect me. The wind shrieks off the Hudson River and down the sharp, straight streets. Finds the cracks in my coat, turns the legs numb beneath their stockings. I turn up my collar and smash my hat closer over my ears, and I set out westward through the fragrant confluence of manure and garbage and gasoline exhaust, in the direction of that shrill whistle floating over the wind and the dirty brick buildings: the sound of the New York Central traversing Tenth Avenue, up the Hudson shore and down to the West Side Station, all the livelong day.

  23

  NOW, I haven’t experienced this corner of Manhattan Island since that startling night at the end of January when a certain Mr. Anson first intruded my notice, and why should I? Nobody sets out in this particular direction unless she’s got dirty New York business to transact, or else an ocean liner to board. But I remember it well: the cobblestones crusted with slush, now gone; the boarded-up saloon on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-Second Street. The tarnished brass plaque outside, which I now take time to read: H. L. HEWITT, LEGAL ADVICE AND PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS. SECOND FLOOR.

  I try the doorknob. Locked, of course. I bang on the door, just like my old friend Brooklyn did that night, only this time nobody comes to open it; no noise of any kind reaches me from the other side of the stoop. I crane my head one way and another—as if that will help—and step back to crane my head upward. Windows closed and dusty. Abandoned aspect overall. No sign of occupation by any members of the New York office of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. No sign of occupation whatever.

  Bang, bang. Desperate now. Bang bang bang. I step back and cup my hands around my mouth and holler upward. “HELLO THERE! ANYBODY IN?”

  “What the hell you doing, lady?”

  I spin around. Man standing there on the sidewalk, dressed in a cheap brown suit, lunch pail dangling from one hand, staring at me like you stare at a leper.

  “There’s an office here,” I say. “On the second floor. Nobody’s answering the door.”

  “An office, ma’am?”

  “Yes! I was here a month ago. A regular office.”

  “You mean the dick? Why, he moved out a couple-a years ago.”

  “No. The Prohibition bureau. They’ve got an office here.”

  He starts to laugh. “Prohis? Not here, ma’am. You got a bum steer. Nobody been in them rooms for years, not since the dick left. Building’s up for sale.”

  “You’re wrong. I was inside that office at the end of January.”

  “Sure you were, ma’am. And my uncle’s the mayor. Maybe you need to lay off the sauce a little.”

  “Oh yeah? Maybe you need to mind your own potatoes, buster.”

  “Suit yourself.” He shrugs. “You just keep on banging and see if anybody opens up. I gotta get back to work.”

  “Yeah, thanks for nothing.”

  “Anytime.” He pauses. Gives me the old up and down. Pats his right front pocket. “Say, I get off at five, if you’re still around. Buy you a drink or something. Got paid yesterday.”

  “Get lost,” I say, and I turn around and bang on the door again, just as if I’m expecting somebody to open it.

  24

  TEN MINUTES later, I’m around back, climbing up the fire escape, because that’s the kind of optimistic broad I am. Determined to discover some kind of life inside this damn building, determined to prove the perfidy of Miss Macduff.

  At the second-floor landing, the window is locked tight, but when I climb up to the next floor, my luck is in. The wooden sash groans and gives way under my urging. I work it up a foot or two and lever my body inside, hea
d and shoulders and hips, like going forth from the womb, I guess, except this world I’m entering is cold and damp and smells of mold, and as I tumble free onto a hideous rotting carpet, a strange feeling mushrooms inside me: the same gut sickness that used to warn me when it was time to skedaddle, back home in River Junction.

  But I am not cowed. Nobody and nothing cows Ginger Kelly. I scramble up from said carpet and brush my skirt. Straighten my hat and my collar and my pocketbook over my elbow. The hall is dark, not a single lamp lit, and quiet as death, except for the noise of Manhattan streaming under the window sash and through the pores in the brickwork. To the left runs the stairway, battered and dirty, leading up to God knows and down to Anson’s office, the office into which Brooklyn dragged me at the end of January, desk and chair and hot coffee brought in by a navy-suited doll of some kind. And Anson himself, still and stern and mountainous, clean and straight and true. Draping his jacket over my shoulders against the chill in the air. Driving me home through a whirling of new snow.

  You know, up until this point, I don’t believe I’ve properly understood just how far I’ve fallen. Just how goofy I’ve gone for a pair of reliable shoulders and a glacial gaze that might or might not contain a small amount of tenderness for me, Ginger Kelly, bastard Appalachia hillbilly, red haired, smart-mouthed, whose bubs could be bought for a dime a time at any old newsagent in town. The enormity of my crush on Special Agent Anson, its exact mass and dimensions, such that the possibility of betrayal seems to threaten the smooth operation of every single last vulnerable organ of my body. As I stand there in that hallway, regarding the shadowy length of the staircase, its dark ending at the second-floor landing, the sensation of sickness grows and grows. Vibrates the delicate molecules of blood that runneth along my veins and into my heart.

  I tell myself, stern-like: Don’t be a coward, Gin. Get ahold of yourself.

  And maybe my blood obeys that command and maybe it doesn’t, but I guess enough will remains pulsing inside said veins to engage my gams in the terrible act of walking down the staircase toward the darkness at the end. Because that’s what I do. Walk down the staircase, step by step, until I’m standing inside that shadow and it’s not so bad, really: like any other shadow, dissolving by the light from the dirty window. I turn up the hallway—Anson’s office, remember, lay on the front side of the building, overlooking the street—and I tread down the mildewed carpet until I reach the last door, swinging easily open under my touch, room empty, desk bare, no paper or pens or telephone or anything. Just nothing but a few sticks of familiar furniture, covered in a layer of dust. Cold, damp air. A sliver of light finding the edge of the window as the winter sun slides west.