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

by Beatriz Williams

  “Does it matter?”

  “It surely does.”

  The boat rocks beneath us, but he doesn’t make a grab for anything. Just balances there on his two braced feet, hands down against his sides. I wish I could see his face better. Wish I could divine some clue to this long, silent contemplation he’s making, this terrible gaze upon me with his eyes the shade of the midnight ocean reflecting the moon.

  “Well?” I demand.

  He says softly, “I was thinking you were the most extraordinary woman I’d ever seen.”

  The boat pitches, catching some sort of broadside, and I lurch forward straight into Anson’s right shoulder. Hard, too, such that he makes an Oof! and staggers back, snatching at me while we tumble together into his seat, the way they do at the pictures, except that instead of kissing him I sort of trip off his knee and land on my buttocks on the narrow, wet boards of the deck.

  And it’s the last straw, damn it, falling on my buttocks at Anson’s feet, catching glimpse of his horrified, silvery expression above me. I make a sound of rage and rise to my knees. I swing my right fist into the bottom of his iron rib cage and then the left fist, and I reckon it hurts me more than it hurts him but I don’t care. Feels too good. I hit him again and again, and he just lets me swing away, taking those fists to his middle, grasping me gently by the blades of my shoulders as if to support me in my singular rampage. “All right, now,” he says, like you might say to a fretful pony, while my swinging slows and stops and I start to list forward into the same belly I’ve just abused. “All right. Deserved that, I guess.”

  “You did. You did. Old Carl—”

  “All right. All right.”

  Seems I’m crying now, too. Why not? Back shuddering against his firm hands. Soft wool fibers of his overcoat stuck to my cheeks. Now he moves, holding me carefully by the shoulders while he slides down from the seat to the deck beside me and gathers me up whole, just scoops me up and presses me snug into the wide, soft plane of his chest.

  “I oughta keep a-belting you. Would, if I’d had any dinner.”

  “You should. I guess I deserve it.”

  “Opening that door on Tenth Avenue. Realizing that Millie was right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Gave me my first kiss, Carl Green. Now he’s gone because-a me.”

  “Wasn’t your fault.”

  “All that blood …”

  I want to express more, but the terrible words won’t form. The blankets have come undone from my shoulders, but the steady warmth of Anson’s arms replaces them. We are just a tangle of blanket and overcoat and great, damp, bony limbs. Exhausted skin and the punch of two heartbeats.

  “I found those agents of mine last month,” he says. Words hitting me somewhere atop my bare head, stirring the hairs there. “When I was keeping watch over you in River Junction. They were in those woods near the cemetery. Buried about a foot deep under the snow.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just didn’t.” He shifts under me. “They looked like your friend Carl, you know. Smashed up around the head. They’d buried the two of them face to foot, like a pair of horses in a pasture. Shoes still laced. The animals had got to them a bit; that’s how I discovered the grave.”

  “The bastard.”

  “It’s a bad business, that’s all. A terrible business. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you in. But you were the only way, you see. There was no other way inside his racket. No one else he might possibly trust, except someone he already knew. Someone in the family, someone who might yet have a reason to dislike the man. Someone with brains and spirit. Who else but you? So I had to see it through. I couldn’t let myself be swayed by …”

  “By what?”

  “By sentiment,” he says softly.

  The air’s dark down here. The moon’s safe over the ridge of the bow. My head lies comfortably against the lapels of Anson’s overcoat; my legs nest into the hollow betwixt the two of his. The boat bobs helplessly. A half mile or so away, a line of floating warehouses lies at anchor, bow to stern, packed to the rafters with any kind of hooch you care to drink: an industry, a city almost, constructed with elaborate human ingenuity in order to circumvent human law. What chance have we got against all that? The two of us, draped upon each other at the bottom of a single motorboat, atop the wide, cold black sea.

  “Why do you do it?” I whisper. “People are going to drink, that’s all. People are going to get fried, whatever the government does. What’s the use?”

  “Because it’s the law,” he answers.

  I wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. That’s all he has to say. I consider all the questions I ought to ask him, the outrage I ought to feel, but instead I find myself overcome by something else, something softer. Pity. Not for Anson himself, but for the entire world, this whole rotten state of human affairs, first war and now this. You can’t win anymore. You can’t get ahead. You shouldn’t even try.

  “I told myself it would be all right,” Anson says. “I made a bargain with myself, that if I kept you from harm, kept the closest possible watch over you, then it didn’t matter that I was deceiving you. That the ends were noble enough.”

  “And I wasn’t, I guess. Noble enough.”

  “That’s not true. You’re the noblest part of this whole business, Miss Kelly. The only one of us worth the trouble.”

  I lift my head from his chest and squint at the tip of his nose. “The trouble of what?”

  “Redeeming.” He says the word without the customary irony. Calm and reverent, like he actually believes in such things.

  “And what if I don’t want redemption? Saints never do have any fun, it seems to me. Never know any earthly joy.”

  “That depends on what you mean by joy, doesn’t it?”

  I lift myself a little more, so my face is next to his, and my breath and his breath curl together in the darkness. “I don’t know. What do you mean by joy, Mr. Anson?”

  He makes a little noise in his throat.

  I place my bare hand on his cheek. The skin is warm and springy beneath my palm. A little scratchy, if I care to stroke my fingers against the wedge of his jaw. Strange how I can feel his skin, while I can’t quite see his face. I run my thumb along the seams until I find the corner of his mouth. The blankets have fallen away from my shoulders. The boat sways around us, the stars wobble on high.

  “Here’s what I think, Mr. Anson,” I whisper. “I think that if you’re lucky enough not to get your head bashed in by some lunatic bootlegger, lucky enough to survive another day in this brute modern world, lucky enough to be sitting inside the measure of somebody’s warm arms at the bottom of a boat where nobody can find you, where you’re safe from harm for just one moment at the end of a terrible day—”

  Anson leaps to his feet. Gin goes kerplop against the deck.

  “Stay down!” he shouts, and the motor growls to life, and that’s when I realize there’s another sound buzzing in, another motor drawing near, and as the boat rears up and shoots across the water, the air explodes into pop-pop-pop-pop-pop: the wicked noise of a Chicago typewriter beating hell out of somebody near.

  9

  OF COURSE I’ve got no intention of obeying Anson’s command. I climb on my hands and knees and start to rise up, and his hand comes down on the center of my back and presses me in place.

  “I said stay down!”

  The motorboat starts to bank into a turn. I sink down low where he can’t reach me and crawl to the back of the cockpit, or whatever you call it, and prop myself up on the seat behind Anson’s. Just sort of poke my head over the parapet while the boat skips crazily beneath me and the unseen chopper spits out its rapid pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop like a mouthful of nails.

  At first, I can’t see anything on that dark water, except the faint glimmer of the lights on shore, bobbing up and down against the horizon of the boat’s stern as we tear the sea apart. And then I recognize that the particular flash of one particular light repr
esents the pop-pop-pop firing of that Thompson submachine gun, and that it weaves back and forth across the phosphorescence of our wake, nimble as a water bug, droning like a skeeter.

  “Who is it?” I scream over my shoulder.

  Anson doesn’t answer. I guess he’s too busy steering this beast of ours through the night air. The noise of the engine builds and builds, the deck slants at an unnerving angle. The force of our speed presses against my skin, weighing down my arms and legs as I creep back upward to the front of the cockpit, anchoring myself on the seats.

  “Where’s your gun?”

  “What?”

  “Your gun!”

  “Just get down, Gin!”

  He must have a holster, right? Surely no special agent of the Bureau of Internal Revenue—present or former—goes anywhere without some kind of insurance policy underwritten by the likes of Smith and Wesson, and especially not to a place like this, crawling with bootleggers and gangsters and pirates of every stripe. I run my hands up under his overcoat, ignoring his shout of outrage. Find the edge of his jacket and reach up under that.

  “Gin!”

  Superfine waistcoat. Buttons. Abdomen twisting away from my touch.

  “Hold still, will you?”

  “For God’s sake! Get down.”

  “Aha! There it is!”

  I slide gun from leather. Work the object back down under jacket and overcoat and into the open air. Anson makes an angry noise. Takes one hand off the wheel to make a grab for the gun, but that kind of maneuver’s easily avoided, if you’ve been reared up in the company of three hillbilly brothers like I have. I turn about and take a second or two to weigh the revolver in my two hands—a .38 Special, and I hope to God it’s loaded—and I stagger back down to my previous post and aim the gun over the edge of the cockpit.

  Now, as you no doubt recollect, my stepfather don’t hold with guns, not even the kind you use to stalk down a deer in the woods or shoot a plump new bird from the sky. He never did enjoy a spell of hunting like the rest of the River Junction menfolk. He professed a love for animals in a state of nature, you see, and the thought of spoiling all that noble fur and keen muscle by the unjust advantage of human machine made him sick to his stomach. He did begrudgingly consent to the raising of dumb livestock, which he butchered himself with a long, sharp knife, but he would not hunt an animal in the wild, not ever, not beast nor fowl nor even fish, and not once did he allow the barrel of a gun to invade the threshold of his house and his land beyond it.

  But my brothers, now. My brothers found themselves more susceptible to the allure of a bolt-action rifle or a long-barreled shotgun or a short, loud pistol. Around the kitchen table, they did nod their heads wisely while Duke held forth on the abomination of shooting God’s creatures, but in the woods with their friends, why, they showed no such tender scruples. And before I left for the convent, I knew the smooth texture of a rifle’s stock beneath my arm, and the calm that settles over you as your finger caresses the curve of the trigger. Not that I especially enjoyed hunting for prey—I shot at made-up targets in the wood, or at objects launched in the air for that purpose, not any living thing—but because of the sensation of power a gun conferred upon me. I might be a weak female, born wanting the heft and muscle and timbre of a man, but I surely could kill him, if I needed to. I surely had the advantage over a fellow, if I held a gun and he did not. If I had the resolve to aim the barrel and press the trigger before he had the opportunity to touch me.

  I haven’t felt the shape of a gun in my two hands for many summers, but it’s the kind of thing you never quite forget. Once done, always remembered. I don’t bother to check that Anson’s revolver is loaded; I can tell by its weight that it is. Just close one eye and settle my soul on that dancing, erratic flash before me, and then, when I find the rhythm of the motorboat’s thrust, sense the pause in its motion before it plunges back down, I do squeeze that trigger in the loving embrace of my right index finger.

  Gun fires BANG. Kicks back like an angry child. Shout comes out across the water, and the pop-pop-pop stops dead. The flash winks out.

  I call back over my shoulder, “Think I got him!”

  Anson swears. The boat starts a sudden turn to the right, banking so hard that I teeter sideways and collapse on the other seat.

  “Hey! What’s the big idea? Didn’t I just shoot the bastard for you?”

  Anson swears again, and the word is so uncharacteristic of him that I actually turn and look out past the bow.

  And that’s when I hear a shout out over the water, and perceive the regular flashing of a large, determined lamp. The boom of an official gun. The motorboat slows in defeat, and while I am no expert in these affairs, I reckon I know the arm of the law when it clasps me to its chest.

  And unless God Almighty now descends from the sky to intervene, the jig is right enough up.

  10

  OBEDIENT TO the orders of the United States Coast Guard officer calling us through a wooden cone, we fall under the lee of the gray-painted cutter and await further instruction.

  “Should I ditch the gun?” I whisper to Anson.

  He fiddles with wheel and throttle. Maneuvers us close. “Give it to me,” he says, and I hand the revolver to him behind his back. He tucks it into the pocket of his overcoat and hails the deck of the cutter in a voice that knows no master.

  “Special Agent Marshall, Bureau of Internal Revenue! In pursuit of known subject.”

  “Marshall?” I whisper. (Anson replies with a dig to my ribs.)

  “By whose authority?” somebody replies.

  “My own, damn it!”

  There is a brief silence. I have the impression of profound professional annoyance, like when a girl from the typing pool in the commercial loans department takes it upon herself to point out some error made by the typing pool in the investment banking department, under such public circumstances that nobody can pretend it didn’t happen.

  A slight commotion ensues. Somebody shouts down a maritime instruction, Greek to me, and Anson brings the motorboat to rest right next to the painted steel hull of the Coast Guard boat. Blood goes whoosh in my veins. Nerves sing out under the premonition of trouble.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” I whisper. “We could outrun them in this thing, I’ll bet.”

  “And they’ll be searching for us all night and all the next day.”

  “But now they’ll arrest us for certain!”

  “Just let me do the talking, all right? Don’t say a damn word.”

  He must mean it, or he wouldn’t have added that telltale damn. A regular blossoming garden of profanities this evening, our Anson. I clam up and cross my hands behind my back. Try not to shiver in the sharp air. The blankets lie in a heap at my feet, like an abandoned nest, once warm, and for an instant I ache all over. Most especially in the kisser.

  Marshall. What kind of game’s he playing now?

  A series of metallic bangs strikes my ear as a rope ladder uncurls against the cutter’s hull. A moment later, a pair of legs descends along that ladder, topped by a dark coat and an officer’s hat. The legs spring deftly from the bottom of the ladder into our snug little motorboat cockpit, and somebody shines down a flashlight from above, revealing a dark mustache attached to a middle-aged face, not best pleased.

  “A Revenue agent, you say? Where’s your badge?”

  “Right here, sir.”

  To my great amazement, Anson unbuttons his overcoat without hesitation and reaches inside his jacket. Hands the officer a piece of paper.

  “Marshall, you say?”

  “Yes, sir. Oliver Marshall, New York Bureau.”

  The officer motions to me. “Who’s this?”

  “Civilian deputy. She’s been assisting me with an investigation.”

  “Name?”

  “Can’t reveal that, sir. I’m afraid you’ll have to appeal to the Bureau. And if everything’s in order, we’d like to return to our pursuit, although I suspect our man has already got
away.”

  The officer’s gaze shifts from me to Anson’s badge to Anson’s face. To me again, sharp and kind of narrow, in the manner of a predatory bird. (You know the look.) Says dryly: “Seemed to me as if you were the one being pursued, agent.”

  Anson replies in kind. “As you may have noted, sir, the fellow happened to be in possession of a Thompson submachine gun, with which he proceeded to fire upon us. My colleague had just returned fire and struck the gunman.”

  “That was her?”

  “Yes, sir. She’s an expert marksman.”

  “Well. The night is full of surprises.”

  I dig my fingernails into my palms and knit my lips firmly together, just like Sister Esmeralda taught me to do when my mouth threatens to get the better of me.

  “I assure you,” says Anson, “this woman is one of the Bureau’s most trusted and valuable associates. I can think of no other partner I would rather have by my side on a dirty night like this.”

  The officer frowns. The old moon’s disappeared, gone behind a cloud or something, and the cutter’s light is harsh on the ridge of his brow. He holds his balance on the small, bobbing deck without thought or effort. Leather hands still clutching that Bureau badge of Anson’s.

  “Look,” Anson says, “it’s been a hard night, and we’ve already lost our man. I’ve got to get back to port and make my report. And boy, am I going to get hauled over the coals for this one.”

  “You should have let us know you were carrying out an operation in these waters. It’s our watch, out here.”

  “I’m sorry about that. Began in spontaneous pursuit and turned into a damned ambush. I’m just sick to death of these fellows slipping through our fingers, that’s all.”

  He says this so sincerely, so brimful of professional dejection, I almost believe him myself. The officer glances back at me, and I assume an air of identical world-weary regret.