Me? I kept my mouth shut. Anytime I got a pang of conscience, anytime I got an urge to do the right thing, I took a look at Mrs. Hessenbaum’s twisted face. She brought it on herself. She backed powerful people into a corner. I wasn’t wanting to do the same.
Kendra came around. She had questions but was smart enough to know she probably didn’t want to know the answers. Mr. Carmichael wasn’t happy, but the now-senator kept his wife’s money with ‘The Offices of Prescott Carmichael.’ Whether he did this out of an appreciation for our investment guidance or out of a desire to not rock the boat, I don’t know.
When he comes in for his annual review, I draw up the necessary documents and paperwork and keep my mouth shut and my eyes down.
Lovers in a Dangerous Time — Part VII
The plane taxied down the runway and the pilot told us to prepare to take fire. It didn’t come. The rebels had kept their word.
“We have anyone who can go get her body?” I asked the fat man in khakis and Oxford shirt. “To make sure she’s taken care of?”
“No. We’re done there. We’re the last of us.”
That gnawed at me. My staying wouldn’t have done her any good. Tonight the rebels will celebrate in the capital. They’ll drink, they’ll dance, they’ll whore. Tomorrow they’ll start the purges. All counter-revolutionaries or those seem as counter-revolutionary will be disappeared. Still, I wished someone would make sure she’s not by the side of the road too long—exposed to the sun and the dogs.
“What about joining us?”
“This isn’t my kind of work,” I said. “I’m an economist, not a spy.”
“It’s nobody’s kind of work, but you’re good at it.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You got the job done. You served your country well.”
“I couldn’t care less about my country. The woman I loved is laying next to an airport access road with a hole in her back.”
“You could do some good in the world.”
I waved my envelope of new identification at him. “Go to hell,” I said. “I’ve done my bit. I’m going to settle down in some little town, open a business and live the rest of my life. I don’t ever want to deal with or hear from the likes of you again.”
I got up and moved to the back of the plane.
I opened the envelope the man had given me. It contained new identification papers, a passport, credit cards and several bundles of American dollars. I pulled out my passport and looked at my new name – Prescott Carmichael.
Cocktail Accompaniment for Over-the-Rhine — A Beer
I like cocktails, but I live in a beer town. Beer just isn’t for me. Cocktails offer the bartender or the drinker a bit of control and creativity in what they drink. But like I said, I live in a beer town and when in Rome, or in my case Cincinnati, you drink the occasional beer whether you mean to or not.
This was even more so in the historical German neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine during the prohibition-era. I wanted to do a throw-back story, so that is when this story is set.
So grab a couple of bottles of something you like, pop the top, turn the page and enjoy Over-the-Rhine.
If, however, you want to keep the cocktail theme of these stories going, add a little something to your beer. Maybe some lemon or lime juice. Possibly a few dashes of bitters. Some herbs. Maybe even a little bourbon.
Why not? It’s your beer.
– Howard McEwen
Over-the-Rhine
Bill McGinn laid down his cards. I looked at them. I didn’t show mine. The grimace on my face revealed all he needed to know about my hand. McGinn smiled and slowly swept up the pot. I swore. I was down four hundred dollars.
When a man who doesn’t gamble gambles with money he doesn’t have, he’s bound to be taught a lesson about himself. Bill McGinn was giving me that lesson.
“One more hand, Bill?
“You’ve not learned your lesson yet, Jake? You can’t play with the big boys.”
“One more hand, Bill?”
He looked me over like I was a bug. He was the cat. I was to be played with.
“Sure,” he said. “But not with me. I’m out. I gotta go see how my place in Newport is doing. Polly will sit in for me.”
Polly looked up from her Vogue and flicked the ash of her Chesterfield onto the floor.
“Really, Bill?” she said.
“Yeah, it’ll boost his confidence.”
She wasn’t a beauty. Her eyes were heavy lidded and she used too much eye shadow, so she always had a sexy, sleepily insouciant look. Her pale face laid across a head with short black hair which sat atop a broom stick of a body. She had nothing going on upstairs or downstairs—no curves, no bounce. There was no shimmy and definitely no shake. She was all angles and elbows. But that face redeemed her with most men. It showed such little interest in… anything. It wasn’t a temptation to men. It was a challenge.
Her voice was dark and rough. She roughed it up even more with two packs of those Chesterfields each day. She drank black coffee during the day and straight rye at night. She ate little.
She sauntered over and took Bill’s seat. He grabbed her arm tight. She looked at him, then through him. Now he was the bug, she the cat. He loosened his grip. Not many stared down Bill McGinn. He recovered.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, toots, after I’m done taking care of business.” He pulled out a gold cigarette case from his coat’s breast pocket, opened it, pulled out another fag and lit it with a gold lighter. He closed the case with a bit too much flair and flash. He was trying to make a show of it. He was trying to impress her still. He was only showing her what a cheap thug he was under all that veneer.
She shrugged in response.
She looked to Pox and said, “Deal, Pox.” Pox dealt.
Pox’s stubby fat fingers handled the cards deftly, but his choice in stogies choked me. That cigar stood out like a flaming fat turd from a face that looked as if someone had gone at it with an ice pick. Acne? Smallpox? I never asked Pox.
It was just me and her across the table. Polly didn’t say a word. She looked at her cards once and put them back down. She didn’t take any. I took one.
She chipped in. I chipped in.
She raised. I matched.
She raised again and I matched again.
The men in the room started to chuckle. Pox egged them on.
“We can switch to old maid if it’d be easier for you, Jake. Poker’s not for everybody.”
“Or Pinochle,” another joker said.
I blew them off. I was trying to catch Polly’s eye, to see into them. Her dark pupils gave me nothing except a faint spark that twinkled briefly after those heavy lids lifted up slowly from a long descent. Then they went flat black again.
I was being made a fool of—being made to play poker with a dame. They knew it, I knew it. Polly knew it. She didn’t cut me any slack, either. She looked at me with those heavy-hooded eyes and bluffed me right into betting more than I had.
“I can’t meet your raise. I’m busted.”
“How about your hat?”
“My hat.”
“Yeah, put your hat in the pot. I could use a new hat.”
“You could use a man’s hat?”
“Yeah, I could use a man’s hat. Put it in the pot.”
I stood, turned and went to the hat rack. My hat was brown with a blood red band with a little duck feather stuck in it. I liked the hat. It was a five dollar hat. It wasn’t worth the ten dollar raise. I was being made a fool of again. I came back to the table and put my hat in the pot over her money and the money I couldn’t afford to be gambling with. I sat.
I showed my cards.
She showed her cards.
I lost my hat.
I knew she was Bill McGinn’s girl. I knew she’d helped make a fool out of me. Yet I still showed up at her apartment on Sycamore later that night. I knew Bill McGinn would be busy with his speakeasies over in Newport late into tomorrow. I heard the local cop
s and some Treasury agents had just busted up one of his clubs.
I knocked. She answered. A Chesterfield was dangling from the edge of her mouth. She let it dangle.
“What are you here for?” she asked.
“I’ve come for my hat.”
“You’ve come for your hat?”
“I’ve come for my hat.”
“You can’t have your hat. It’s my hat.
“I’ve come for my hat.”
“I won it. What are you? A welcher?”
“You can’t wear it. I want my hat.”
“Anyway, you’re lying”
“I’m lying?”
“Yeah, you’re not here for your hat.”
“I’m not?”
“No.”
She took the Chesterfield from her mouth, blew a long cloud of smoke into the air and stepped in close. “I tell you what, Jake. You tell me the real reason you’re here and you’ll get what you came for and you’ll get your hat.”
I gave her a good, hard stare. All she ever gave were good, hard stares.
“I’m here to take you to bed,” I told her.
“Alright, Jake. Come on in.”
I woke early the next morning with the nagging worry that McGinn may have tidied up his business in Newport earlier than I expected. He probably wouldn’t take kindly to a man having his girl in a bed he was paying for. I also wasn’t in a mood to stick around. Like I said, Polly wasn’t a beauty. The shadows of the night suited her. Dawn’s morning light did not. I climbed into my slacks, pulled over my shirt, picked up my shoes and set my hat on my head. I couldn’t find my socks. I left them. I tip-toed out and put my shoes onto my bare feet at the bottom of the stairs.
I don’t normally gamble with money I don’t have, nor do I usually sleep with a bootlegger’s whore, but I had a reason to do so. I was bored.
Nothing excited me. Nothing made me laugh. Nothing caught my interest. The only time I felt alive was when I was doing something a little stupid. I crossed the street in the middle of the block. I picked fights. I drank cheap booze from sketchy gin mills. I played poker with bootleggers. I slept with bootlegger’s whores. Those things gave me a jolt, but by the morning I was bored again.
I walked back to my place and changed into a fresh shirt and put on some socks then walked around the city to clear my head. When I caught a whiff of the river, I figured my head was clear enough and headed back to the office. I stopped at the corner at Vine waiting to cross Fourth when I leaned a bit too far off the curb and one of the Henry Ford’s new Model A’s about took my head off. I stepped back and an elegant Cord L-29 Phaeton pulled to a noiseless stop in front of me.
I hate cars in general but that Cord in particular. The reason? That Model A is just as out of reach as this Cord. I’m broke. Both cars were taunting me about it.
I turned on my heels and headed uptown to ‘The Offices of Prescott Carmichael.’ I don’t know why. There’s nothing to do there. Clients are leaving us. We’re not bringing on new ones. Mr. Carmichael has told me to be patient, but it’s hard to be patient when your pay has been cut and you sit idle all day. Like I said, I’m bored.
Some clients are sticking with us. However, none of them are invested. We’ve been sitting by since the summer of last year—1928—while the market keeps going through the roof. Mr. Carmichael says the market is going to fall. He says this new Federal Reserve in Washington has tightened the money supply way too much and that’s going to undercut the market in a big way. He says the Federal Reserve doesn’t know what they’re doing.
“This Federal Reserve controls the money supply,” he says. “That’s the blood of this economic body. Reduce it, leech it away, and the body will become weak. They’ve leeched too much away.”
All I know is I’m broke and bored and the market keeps roaring up and up.
What I’m beginning to be afraid of is that he doesn’t understand is that we are living in a new era. America is getting off the farms and into the factories and life is getting better all over. In the last ten years—since the war ended—we’ve gotten radio and automobiles and talking movies and penicillin and my favorite, flappers. Just two months ago, I saw a demonstration of a picture radio by the Crosley Company. Heck, I just bought myself an electric shaver. Life is getting so much easier and it’s going to keep going that way. How could it not? A downturn? One so big it’s worth sitting out of the greatest bull market ever? I had my doubts.
But Mr. Carmichael seems convinced. Not so much that we’re going back to times before the electric lightbulb, but that the market is heading for a downturn in a big way. So we sit. We do nothing. Clients leave and I’m bored. I’d pour myself into something productive, a hobby or another interest, but I don’t have any. Yeah, I know. Idle hands, devil’s playground.
I walked into the office and Mrs. Johnson is clacking away at the typewriter. She’s not typing a letter. She’s doing drills. She’s keeping her skills honed. She spent a lot of time learning that machine and neither Mr. Carmichael or myself have been giving her enough correspondence in this last year for her to keep up to snuff.
She smiled at me as I walk into the office. Her smile is formal and professional, like the woman herself. I hooked my hat on the rack and I see that Mrs. Johnson caught a whiff of Polly’s eau de toilet. Her only response was to raise a judgmental eyebrow. The night with Polly was a diversion, but I’ve given thought to doing the same with Mrs. Johnson—if she wasn’t married. She doesn’t dress like the girls do now. She wears stuff my mother does, but she wears it so much better than mom. The cut of the dresses those flapper girls wear won’t do for Mrs. Johnson. Her curves are too curvy for today’s fashion and that’s all right by me.
“Mr. Firebridge is in with Mr. Carmichael, Mr. Gibb. He requested you join him when you arrived.”
I knocked as I entered Mr. Carmichael’s office. Mr. Firebridge flashed me an annoyed look but still took my hand when I offered it to him.
“Good to see you again, Mr. Firebridge.”
Mr. Firebridge was a chemist. He made his money with a process that hardened the tubes that went into the Crosley Radios they made in town and shipped across the country. He’d turned that fortune into a larger one by getting involved in the ceramics that made up the spark plugs of automobiles. Mr. Firebridge had been giving Mr. Carmichael grief lately about not being in the market when all his fellow mini-industrialists were making fortunes. Today, his look was harder than usual.
Mr. Carmichael asked me to sit. I sat.
“I’m thinking Mr. Gibb may be able to offer some special assistance here, Mr. Firebridge.”
“How so?”
“He knows the people. At least, he knows them better than you or me. He grew up with them, in a way.”
“What people did I grow up with, in a way?” I asked.
“The Krauts,” Mr. Firebridge snapped.
I nodded noncommittally. I did know the Krauts. I did grow up with them, in a way.
“Mr. Firebridge’s chief assistant, Mr. Heinrich, died two weeks ago. His son, Otto, who also worked for Mr. Firebridge, but in a lesser capacity, has disappeared with two valuable items.”
“Those being?” I asked.
“The first is a notebook, a journal of sorts that Mr. Firebridge and Mr. Henrich have been keeping for the last several years. It contains the results of several chemical tests. Mr. Firebridge seems to think he and the now deceased Mr. Henrich were on the verge of a new discovery.”
“That being?”
“Artificial rubber,” said Mr. Firebridge.
“Why would anyone need that? Doesn’t it grow on trees?”
Mr. Firebridge rolled his eyes at me and muttered, “Lack of imagination.”
“According to Mr. Firebridge,” Mr. Carmichael continued, “The price of rubber has gone up dramatically as the uses for it has gone up. He doesn’t see it coming down. An artificial rubber—if it could be made cheaper—would be a boon.
Mr. Firebridge interrupted.
“Image all those trees that are grown and chopped down in Brazil and shipped to Akron to be made into tires replaced by this faux rubber,” he said. It would make me a fortune—another fortune.”
I’m not sure I fully grasped the fortune making nature of the not-quite-yet made discovery, but I’d think about giving it some thought.
“And the second item taken?” I asked.
“My daughter.”
“A bit more valuable,” I said. He didn’t agree or disagree.
“I figure Otto took my formula and my daughter into Over-the-Rhine. They’re hiding out there doing God knows what. I’d go myself, but it’s a foreign country to Americans like us.”
“That’s where you come in, Mr. Gibb,” said my boss, Prescott Carmichael.
I looked to him hoping my look asked the question for me. It did.
“You have connections there and know people… from working on the subway with your father. You know how they live, how they think and a bit of their German, no?”
I nodded. I had no desire to cross into Over-the-Rhine looking for Otto the Kraut and a runaway American heiress. Then again, like I said, I was bored.
“I’ll need something to go on? You know any of Otto’s family, addresses, anything?”
“No,” said Mr. Firebridge.
“You have the late Mr. Heinrich’s address?”
“No. Why would I?”
“I don’t know. In case his son ran off with your notebook and daughter?”
Mr. Firebridge gruffed. Mr. Carmichael frowned. I continued.
“Tell me about Otto.”
“Typical Kraut. He showed up for work, put in a hard day, did what he was told without questions. They’re not really a free thinking people—especially the Catholic varieties. They’ve not much experience with freedom. I never met his mother or any other family—just his father. I know they lived in Over-the-Rhine but no idea where.”
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