An Orphan of Hell's Kitchen

by Liz Freeland

“He plucked me off the street and gave me this job.”

  “Sure, but if you don’t do what he wants—”

  His words broke off, and a tense silence rent the air.

  “If I don’t do what he wants . . . ?”

  He picked up his sandwich again. “Just watch yourself. He’s not—”

  The door opened, and the Skipper walked in. Frustration filled me. Johann had been on the verge of divulging something interesting. Now his attention pivoted to the old man in the cap.

  “Nothing today,” Johann told him.

  “Ah, a wasted trip, then.” He caught my eye and removed his cap. His scalp was mostly bald with a dusting of gray bristles. Did I detect suspicion in his gaze? “As I walked in, you were having a conversation. Very intimate, I would have guessed.”

  Johann looked alarmed. “You’re all wet. I was just having lunch, is all.” His denial didn’t cover the splotches of red that appeared in his cheeks, though, and he lowered his gaze. To my dismay, he was looking at the indentations the letter opener had made against the wood of the drawer. He ran his finger along it.

  I jumped out of my chair. “Would you like something hot to drink?” I asked the Skipper. “It’s so chilly out, and snowing.”

  The man scoffed. “This? This is nothing.” His lightly accented voice reminded me of relatives back home. “You young people are spoiled. I moved here in the winter of eighty-eight.”

  Johann, who’d taken up his food again, chewed through a half laugh and winked at me. “Here comes the blizzard story.”

  The Skipper scowled at him. “You laugh? Fifty inches of snow, delivered in a wind like a hurricane. Snow drifts reached the second stories of buildings and people trapped on elevated trains had to be rescued with ladders. Overhead wires snapped and fell, making it treacherous to clear snow. Scores of people froze to death. Sure, laugh at the hardships of the past—and then howl in outrage when bad things happen in your lifetime.” His sneer took in both of us. “Do you expect always to be comfortable, that tragedy will not touch you? I envy your ignorance. And I pity you for what you’ll learn before too long.”

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d spat on us in disgust. At least the Skipper’s diatribe had turned my coworker’s attention away from the drawer, though.

  “Who said anything about being comfortable?” Johann’s voice arced up defensively. “I do nothing but look over articles about war, for Pete’s sake.”

  “That’s right. You sit on your fat duff reading about war. No one’s going to pin a medal on you for that.”

  Johann’s face went red. “My country’s not at war.”

  For a moment I thought the old man might spontaneously combust. “Isn’t it? Wilson’s got Germany’s ships in America’s harbors, German sailors marooned in her ports. And are they blockading the British? Of course not. How is choosing sides like that not considered being at war?”

  “That’s what Das Auge’s telling the people,” Johann said. “The work I’m doing here is just as important as a soldier’s.”

  “Exactly,” I piped up loyally. “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

  The man’s mouth turned down in a sour frown. “Not when the bullets start flying.”

  After the old man stumped out, Johann sagged in his chair in relief. “What’s eating him?”

  I went back to my typewriter. “I guess anyone who looks at the situation as closely as you and he do every day must feel frustrated about the war.”

  “Sure, but why take it out on me? I don’t understand these people sometimes.”

  These people. Was Johann experiencing friction with Holger and his associates?

  I pecked at a few keys—wishing I hadn’t forgotten my German spelling from school. I was prone to leaving out umlauts, or worse, putting them in where they weren’t needed, like two eyeballs staring pointlessly back at me.

  “What does the Skipper do, exactly?” I asked.

  Johann stared through me as if he weren’t actually seeing me. A few seconds ticked by before he roused himself to answer. “He just . . . runs errands.” He shrugged. “You could ask Holger about him, but I doubt you’d get a straight answer.”

  “So many mysteries,” I said.

  Johann, evidently still smarting over his interchange with the Skipper, let out a huff. “Imagine that old man telling me I wasn’t doing anything. He’s got a crust.”

  “Well, so might you if you’d lived through the Blizzard of Eighty-Eight.” I tried to imitate the old man’s accented, dramatically quavering voice when he’d talked about the blizzard.

  Johann laughed, and for a moment our camaraderie fell back in place. In the next instant, though, any trace of a smile disappeared and he resumed our prior discussion. “You don’t have to step out with Holger just because you’re grateful to him, Leisl.”

  What was it about my relationship to Holger that bothered him? “Anyone would think the two of you weren’t friends.”

  “Friends!” He snorted. “I should say not. This is his newspaper, that’s all. As for the rest . . .”

  I wasn’t about to let him leave that thought dangling. “The rest of what?”

  “Nothing,” he answered quickly. “Only I don’t like the way he deals with people.”

  “Why?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head.

  I don’t like the way he deals with people. What did that mean? Did he realize Holger was the type who hired people to spy on his employees, or was something worse going on?

  I blinked in my best approximation of dewy-eyed confusion. “Now you’re being very mysterious.”

  “You have to be, around here.” His lips quirked self-deprecatingly. “He gave me my job, too. Do you think positions like this are easy to come by?”

  “I know they’re not,” I said. “I’ve had a hard enough time finding anything.”

  “Then stop asking questions.”

  I smiled, trying to lighten the mood. “Maybe you’ll tell me tonight, when you’re sketching me.”

  He wadded up his waxed-paper wrapper. Without meeting my eye, he said, “I forgot. Something came up. Maybe we can meet some other time.”

  “Of course,” I said, but I could tell that “some other time” meant never.

  He was convinced I was Holger’s girl, so he was going to steer clear of any intimate situation between us. There seemed to be a paranoia about this beyond simply not wanting to offend his employer.

  My objective for the next day, I decided, was to worm my way back into his good graces. Whatever he knew about Holger, I needed to wheedle it out of him by any means necessary.

  CHAPTER 20

  It was only a week before Christmas, but no one would have guessed by looking at our apartment. It seemed strange, especially in light of last Christmas, when we’d taken such joy in our little tree and tucking our wrapped gifts beneath it. The tree had reminded us of the best moments of our childhoods, which Callie and I both wanted to remember as a little happier than they actually were. I missed the camaraderie of those days last December, that feeling of having survived a turbulent year. We’d felt invincible, indivisible.

  Now... I didn’t know. The dry, undecorated tree sagged in its corner. Callie and I hadn’t had a good chin-wag after our argument about Anna Muldoon, and neither of us had mentioned plans for celebrating Christmas. The only packages in evidence were bundles for Belgium—and even Callie’s enthusiasm for that worthy cause seemed to have waned a little since Teddy left.

  When I emerged from my room the next morning, Callie was at the table, dressed smartly in a fitted, dark blue rough silk dress. A mug of coffee sat before her.

  “Oh good,” she said, not looking up from the latest issue of Motion Picture News. “I was hoping to get a chance to talk to you.” Her voice sounded tense.

  “What about?” Still barely awake, I wasn’t ready for another argument.

  “I have an audition this morning.”

  I let out a breath
. Her tone had led me to expect something terrible. “Didn’t you say Christmas is a slow time for theatrical casting?”

  “A road tour needs a replacement,” she explained. “The second lead in a comedy bit had her appendix go out on her in Omaha. If I’m lucky, I’ll catch up to them in St. Louis.”

  Missouri? A bit? “Vaudeville?”

  The surprise in my voice registered in her ear as disdain, if her stiff-backed reaction was any indication. “Listen to you, Miss Hoity-Toity, the theater snob.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to do vaudeville.”

  “Maybe I did say something like that a year or so ago, but that was when my career felt like it was taking off like a shooting star. I forgot that shooting stars are in the process of flaming out.”

  “You’re not flaming out,” I protested. “Is this because Alfred Sheldrake took a shine to Anna? There must be other directors who’d jump at the chance to have you work for them. It’s not as if you’re desperate.”

  “Tell that to the Calumet Savings Bank.” She nodded toward the kitchen. We kept our housekeeping money in an old Calumet baking powder tin. Until recently, the balance in the tin had been getting healthier, but I hadn’t checked it lately.

  “If you need money . . .” Goodness knows she’d floated me often enough.

  “I’m not going to take your cash when I’ve got a perfectly good way to make some on my own. There’s nothing wrong with vaudeville. Ethel Barrymore’s toured the circuit.”

  The exceptional Miss Barrymore. She did pictures . . . toured in vaudeville . . . what next? A trapeze act for the Ringling Brothers?

  “You’ll be gone for months,” I said, sinking into a chair.

  She set her magazine aside. “I’ll send postcards.”

  The look in her eyes belied her glib answer. I’d lived with Callie almost as long as I’d been in New York. She was my best friend, my confidante, my housemate. She told me the truth when I didn’t want to hear it, and had picked me up during moments when I was at my lowest. Yes, we had our disagreements, but she was the closest I’d ever come to having a sister. The thought of her going away left me bereft.

  “You know I’m rooting for you to get it, if that’s what you want.” This was true, but I felt sore at heart already, and she was still sitting right in front of me.

  “Don’t break out the mourning crepe yet. I haven’t even auditioned. If I do get it, I’ll miss you and everybody here, but I can’t deny I won’t mind getting out of town for a bit now that—”

  She didn’t have to finish. Now that Teddy’s gone. “Besides,” she went on, “you’re so busy all the time with your police work, you probably won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  “You can’t seriously believe that. Who will I talk to, and celebrate the holiday with?” I gave her shoe a nudge with my foot. “Who will give me advice on fashion?”

  She smiled. “I’ll pin instructions to all your wardrobe items before I leave. And at least you have your uniform to fall back on.”

  “Not today. I was going to ask to borrow something to make me alluring to my coworker on the newspaper.”

  She blinked in confusion. “What newspaper?”

  Of course—she didn’t know what I’d been up to in the past two days. Now I filled her in about being yanked off the street by Secret Service operatives, and my clandestine assignment for the government. The longer I spoke, the wider her eyes grew.

  “Louise, you’re crazy. These people sound dangerous.”

  “The Germans?”

  “All of them. And if you ask me, that fellow Johann was trying to warn you about something. Remember, these are men you suspect of having something to do with Ruthie’s death.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. But I don’t have any proof. I’m beginning to think there isn’t any.”

  “What does Muldoon think about it?”

  “He doesn’t know.” I had to give Callie an update on my falling out with him too, although I left out the unflattering things he’d said about her and actresses in general.

  Astonishment was written all over her face. “And you didn’t tell me any of this?”

  “We’ve both been busy. But I’m glad to have told you now, especially about my work. If I disappear, you’ll know it’s in service to my country.”

  “Sounds like you were drafted.” A blond eyebrow arched. “Just how far are you willing to go on your charm offensive against this fellow Johann?”

  “Nothing too outrageous. He’s already acting like a wounded lover. A flash of ankle should do.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re working as a government spy, not playacting in a hoary old Clyde Fitch drama.”

  “I’m still me, not Salome of the Secret Service.”

  “All right, but you need something distinctive—but subtle—to catch Johann’s attention.” She thought for a moment. “This might be a job for Beaux Rêves.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Perfume. Teddy gave it to me.”

  “I couldn’t—”

  She waved away my objection before I could voice it. “You’re not going to take a bath in it. Just dab on enough so he’ll get a good whiff. It’s not a magic potion, mind. You’ll have to do the rest.”

  She was so good at thinking of things like this. “Maybe you should be working for the Secret Service.”

  She laughed as she stood. “I’d rather not have strange men snatching me off dark streets, thank you very much.”

  “It’s been pretty dull at the paper so far.”

  “From what you’re telling me, it’s about to get more lively.” She looked me over. I was still in my bathrobe and slippers. “You’ll need to wear something flashier than usual. Something to catch his eye. You should look through my wardrobe for something—anything but my new crimson velvet,” she added quickly. “And maybe an accessory that lets him know that you wanted to stand out today.”

  Callie helped me sort through her wardrobe. As an eye-catcher, she picked out a stole she’d found in the bag I’d brought from Ruthie’s. It was in surprisingly good shape, which made me suspect it had been acquired shortly before Ruthie’s death. The fur was of undetermined origin—a grayish brown, not as soft as rabbit, but certainly nothing dear like mink.

  “Do they make stoles of woodchucks?” she wondered aloud as she draped it around my shoulders.

  “I’m not sure.” I modeled it over my robe. “What do you think?”

  “It’ll snap up your coat a little. And if you’re smart, you’ll get Johann to help you with that sticky clasp.”

  I stood before her bureau mirror to see how it looked. Not bad. It was fitting that I’d be wearing Ruthie’s stole, since it was looking into her death that had set me on this path. “Your wardrobe advice always gives me confidence.”

  “Just don’t be too confident. Even jolly, pudgy fellows can turn wolf when they sense easy prey.”

  “I can handle Johann.”

  “That declaration has the ring of famous last words,” Callie said.

  Which was another reason I dreaded Callie’s going away. She was usually right about men.

  * * *

  An hour later, doused in Beaux Rêves and bedecked in the woodchuck stole, I swanned into the office of Das Auge. Luck was with me. Johann looked up, and from his lingering glance I could tell he noticed the care I’d taken with my appearance.

  “Oh bother,” I said, following Callie’s script as I stood by the coatrack. “I never can get the hang of this clasp . . .”

  He bolted out of his chair. “Let me help.”

  Within seconds, he was standing before me, breathing in a gulp of Beaux Rêves–scented air. I could almost tell the second the perfume hit his brain.

  “You must think I’m a ninny, unable to dress myself.” I smiled. “Or undress myself, as the case may be.”

  “I’m good at this—I mean, I’m good at clasps and things. Not undressing women.” His red face would have given a boiled lobster a run for its money.


  “I knew what you meant.” I stepped closer, tilting my torso closer to his chest and angling my neck so he could have better access to the clasp.

  He lifted his hands to it, squinting in concentration. “It’s just a little—”

  For a moment I didn’t know what had stopped him. The memory of Holger? Had I overdone the perfume? Was the clasp truly a tricky one?

  Johann was staring at the stole almost as if he feared the poor creature that had given up its life for it would come back to life and bite him. Slowly, his gaze traveled up to mine. The alarm written across his face reminded me of Gerald when he’d seen Eddie.

  “That”—he made a gesture toward the stole—“is yours?”

  “It is now. I bought it off a peddler.” I studied his face. “Is something wrong?”

  He swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple hurdled over his collar. “It looks familiar.”

  I glanced down at the stole, in part to disguise my nervous reaction. He’d seen it before—on Ruthie?

  He backed away as if I were about to put a curse on him. “I’m sorry,” he said, too quickly. “It’s just—I’m very busy this morning.”

  I smiled as though I saw nothing amiss, even though my nerves were jangling as much as his appeared to be. The only reason I could see for his being discombobulated by Ruthie’s stole was if he had been involved in her death. And now I was alone with him. Instinct screamed at me to drop everything and run. Curiosity—and my duty to the assignment I’d accepted—made me take up my usual post at the typewriter desk.

  Not long after I arrived, Johann wrote a note and flagged down a boy off the street to deliver the message for him. Some of my colleagues at the precinct referred to these children as guttersnipes—homeless boys who scraped by on whatever work came their way, or by thievery. Their other occupation was dodging truancy officers and social workers. Unfortunately, I missed where—and to whom—the message was going. Johann was being secretive.

  The thread of tension in the office remained all day, unalleviated by Johann’s usual jokes or running discursive monologues. My plan to get Johann to open up had backfired, but the fact that he’d reacted so strongly to the sight of Ruthie’s stole was useful in itself. Useful, and worrying.