“Haven’t I been telling you that seal needs to be replaced?”
“I know you have.”
“Well, you just stay in tomorrow, and I’ll take that leg with me to the shop, get it fixed up tip-top again. Have it back before you know it.”
“It’s fine. I already patched it. It’ll hold.”
“Until the next time,” he says, and she knows well enough from the tone of his voice that he doesn’t want to argue with her about this, that he’s losing patience. “You go and let that valve blow out, and you’ll be needing a good deal more doctoring than a chink whore can provide. There’s a lot of pressure builds up inside those pistons. You know that, Missouri.”
“Yeah, I know that,” she says.
“Sometimes you don’t act like you know it.”
“I can’t stay in tomorrow. But I’ll let you take it the next day, I swear. I’ll stay in Thursday, and you can take my leg then.”
“Thursday,” the mechanic grumbles. “And so I just gotta keep my fingers crossed until then?”
“It’ll be fine,” she tells him again, trying to sound reassuring and reasonable, trying not to let the bright rind of panic show in her voice. “I won’t push so hard. I’ll stick to the slow dances.”
And then a long and disagreeable sort of silence settles over the room, and for a time she sits there at the edge of the bed, staring at both her legs, at injured meat and treacherous, unreliable metal. Machines break down, she thinks, and the flesh is weak. Ain’t nothing yet conjured by God nor man won’t go and turn against you, sooner or later. Missouri sighs and lightly presses a porcelain thumb to the artificial leg’s green release switch; there’s a series of dull clicks and pops as it comes free of the bolts set directly into her pelvic bones.
“I’ll stay in tomorrow,” she says and sets her left leg into its stand near the foot of their bed. “I’ll send word to Madam Ling. She’ll understand.”
When the mechanic doesn’t tell her that it’s really for the best, when he doesn’t say anything at all, she looks and sees he’s dozed off sitting up, still wearing his trousers and suspenders and undershirt. “You,” she says quietly, then reaches for the release switch on her right arm.
4.
When she feels his hands on her, Missouri thinks at first that this is only some new direction her dream has taken, the rambling dream of her father’s medicine wagon and of buffalo, of rutted roads and a flaxen Nebraska sky filled with flocks of automatic birds chirping arias from La traviata. But there’s something substantial about the pale light of the waxing moon falling though the open window and the way the curtains move in the midnight breeze that convinces her she’s awake. Then he kisses her, and one hand wanders down across her breasts and stomach and lingers in the unruly thatch of hair between her legs.
“Unless maybe you got something better to be doing,” he mutters in her ear.
“Well, now that you mention it, I was dreaming,” she tells him, “before you woke me up,” and the mechanic laughs.
“Then maybe I should let you get back to it,” but when he starts to take his hand away from her privy parts, she takes hold of it and rubs his fingertips across her labia.
“So, what exactly were you dreaming about that’s got you in such a cooperative mood, Miss Missouri Banks?” he asks and kisses her again, the dark stubble on his cheeks scratching at her face.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she says.
“I figure that’s likely why I inquired.”
His face is washed in the soft blue-green glow of her San Francisco eye, which switched on as soon as she awoke, and times like this it’s hard not to imagine all the ways her life might have gone but didn’t, how very unlikely that it went this way, instead. And she starts to tell him the truth, her dream of being a little girl and all the manufactured birds, the shaggy herds of bison, and how her father kept insisting he should give up peddling his herbs and remedies and settle down somewhere. But at the last, and for no particular reason, she changes her mind, and Missouri tells him another dream, just something she makes up off the top of her sleep-blurred head.
“You might not like it,” she says.
“Might not,” he agrees. “Then again, you never know,” and the first joint of an index finger slips inside her.
“Then again,” she whispers, and so she tells him a dream she’s never dreamt. How there was a terrible fire and before it was over and done with, the flames had claimed half the city, there where the grass ends and the mountains start. And at first, she tells him, it was an awful, awful dream, because she was trapped in the boarding house when it burned, and she could see him down on the street, calling for her, but, try as they may, they could not reach each other.
“Why you want to go and have a dream like that for?” he asks.
“You wanted to hear it. Now shut up and listen.”
So he does as he’s bidden, and she describes to him seeing an enormous airship hovering above the flames, spewing its load of water and sand into the ravenous inferno.
“There might have been a dragon,” she says. “Or it might have only been started by lightning.”
“A dragon,” he replies, working his finger in a little deeper. “Yes, I think it must definitely have been a dragon. They’re so ill-tempered this time of year.”
“Shut up. This is my dream,” she tells him, even though it isn’t. “I almost died, so much of me got burned away, and they had me scattered about in pieces in the Charity Hospital. But you went right to work, putting me back together again. You worked night and day at the shop, making me a pretty metal face and a tin heart, and you built my breasts – ”
“ – from sterling silver,” he says. “And your nipples I fashioned from out pure gold.”
“And just how the sam hell did you know that?” she grins. Then Missouri reaches down and moves his hand, slowly pulling his finger out of her. Before he can protest, she’s laid his palm over the four bare bolts where her leg fits on. He smiles and licks at her nipples, then grips one of the bolts and gives it a very slight tug.
“Well, while you were sleeping,” he says, “I made a small window in your skull, only just large enough that I can see inside. So, no more secrets. But don’t you fret. I expect your hair will hide it quite completely. Madam Ling will never even notice, and nary a Chinaman will steal a glimpse of your sweet, darling brain.”
“Why, I never even felt a thing.”
“I was very careful not to wake you.”
“Until you did.”
And then the talk is done, without either of them acknowledging that the time has come, and there’s no more of her fiery, undreamt dreams or his glib comebacks. There’s only the mechanic’s busy, eager hands upon her, only her belly pressed against his, the grind of their hips after he has entered her, his fingertips lingering at the sensitive bolts where her prosthetics attach. She likes that best of all, that faint electric tingle, and she knows he knows, though she has never had to tell him so. Outside and far away, she thinks she hears an owl, but there are no owls in the city.
5.
And when she wakes again, the boarding-house room is filled with the dusty light of a summer morning. The mechanic is gone, and he’s taken her leg with him. Her crutches are leaned against the wall near her side of the bed. She stares at them for a while, wondering how long it’s been since the last time she had to use them, then deciding it doesn’t really matter, because however long it’s been, it hasn’t been long enough. There’s a note, too, on her nightstand, and the mechanic says not to worry about Madam Ling, that he’ll send one of the boys from the foundry down to the Asian Quarter with the news. Take it easy, he says. Let that burn heal. Burns can be bad. Burns can scar, if you don’t look after them.
When the clanging steeple bells of St. Margaret of Castello’s have rung nine o’clock, she shuts her eyes and thinks about going back to sleep. St. Margaret, she recalls, is a patron saint of the crippled, an Italian woman who was born blind and
hunchbacked, lame and malformed. Missouri envies the men and women who take comfort in those bells, who find in their tolling more than the time of day. She has never believed in the Catholic god or any other sort, unless perhaps it was some capricious heathen deity assigned to watch over starving, maggot-ridden guttersnipes. She imagines what form that god might assume, and it is a far more fearsome thing than any hunchbacked crone. A wolf, she thinks. Yes, an enormous black wolf – or coyote, perhaps – all ribs and mange and a distended, empty belly, crooked ivory fangs and burning eyes like smoldering embers glimpsed through a cast-iron grate. That would be her god, if ever she’d had been blessed with such a thing. Her mother had come from Presbyterian stock somewhere back in Virginia, but her father believed in nothing more powerful than the hand of man, and he was not about to have his child’s head filled up with Protestant superstition and nonsense, not in a Modern age of science and enlightenment.
Missouri opens her eyes again, her green eye – all cornea and iris, aqueous and vitreous humours – and the ersatz one designed for her in San Francisco. The crutches are still right there, near enough that she could reach out and touch them. They have good sheepskin padding and the vulcanized rubber tips have pivots and are filled with some shock-absorbing gelatinous substance, the name of which she has been told but cannot recall. The mechanic ordered them for her special from a company in some faraway Prussian city, and she knows they cost more than he could rightly afford, but she hates them anyway. And lying on the sweat-damp sheets, smelling the hazy morning air rustling the gingham curtains, she wonders if she built a little shrine to the wolf god of all collier guttersnipes, if maybe he would come in the night and take the crutches away so she would never have to see them again.
“It’s not that simple, Missouri,” she says aloud, and she thinks that those could have been her father’s words, if the theosophists are right and the dead might ever speak through the mouths of the living.
“Leave me alone, old man” she says and sits up. “Go back to the grave you yearned for, and leave me be.”
Her arm is waiting for her at the foot of the bed, right where she left it the night before, reclining in its cradle, next to the empty space her leg ought to occupy. And the hot breeze through the window, the street- and coal smoke-scented breeze, causes the scrap of paper tacked up by her vanity mirror to flutter against the wall. Her proverb, her precious stolen scrap of Shakespeare. What’s past is prologue.
Missouri Banks considers how she can keep herself busy until the mechanic comes back to her – a torn shirt sleeve that needs mending, and she’s no slouch with a needle and thread. Her good stockings could use a rinsing. The dressing on her leg should be changed; Madam Ling saw to it she had a small tin of the pungent salve to reapply when Missouri changed the bandages. Easily half a dozen such mundane tasks, any woman’s work, any woman who is not a dancer, and nothing that won’t wait until the bells of St. Margaret’s ring ten or eleven. And so she watches the window, the sunlight and flapping gingham, and it isn’t difficult to call up with almost perfect clarity the piano and the guzheng and the Irishman thumping his bodhrán, the exotic, festive trill of the xiao. And with the music swelling loudly inside her skull, she can then recall the dance. And she is not a cripple in need of patron saints or a guttersnipe praying to black wolf gods, but Madam Ling’s specialty, the steam- and blood-powered gem of the Nine Dragons. She moves across the boards, and men watch her with dark and drowsy eyes as she pirouettes and prances through grey opium clouds.
The Maltese Unicorn
New York City (May 1935)
It wasn’t hard to find her. Sure, she had run. After Szabó let her walk like that, I knew Ellen would get wise that something was rotten, and she’d run like a scared rabbit with the dogs hot on its heels. She’d have it in her head to skip town, and she’d probably keep right on skipping until she was out of the country. Odds were pretty good she wouldn’t stop until she was altogether free and clear of this particular plane of existence. There are plenty enough fetid little hidey holes in the universe, if you don’t mind the heat and the smell and the company you keep. You only have to know how to find them, and the way I saw it, Ellen Andrews was good as Rand and McNally when it came to knowing her way around.
But first, she’d go back to that apartment of hers, the whole eleventh floor of the Colosseum, with its bleak westward view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. I figured there would be those two or three little things she couldn’t leave the city without, even if it meant risking her skin to collect them. Only she hadn’t expected me to get there before her. Word on the street was Harpootlian still had me locked up tight, so Ellen hadn’t expected me to get there at all.
From the hall came the buzz of the elevator, then I heard her key in the lock, the front door, and her footsteps as she hurried through the foyer and the dining room. Then she came dashing into that French Rococo nightmare of a library, and stopped cold in her tracks when she saw me sitting at the reading table with al-Jaldaki’s grimoire open in front of me.
For a second, she didn’t say anything. She just stood there, staring at me. Then she managed a forced sort of laugh and said, “I knew they’d send someone, Nat. I just didn’t think it’d be you.”
“After that gip you pulled with the dingus, they didn’t really leave me much choice,” I told her, which was the truth, or all the truth I felt like sharing. “You shouldn’t have come back here. It’s the first place anyone would think to check.”
Ellen sat down in the arm chair by the door. She looked beat, like whatever comes after exhausted, and I could tell Szabó’s gunsels had made sure all the fight was gone before they’d turned her loose. They weren’t taking any chances, and we were just going through the motions now, me and her. All our lines had been written.
“You played me for a sucker,” I said, and picked up the pistol that had been lying beside the grimoire. My hand was shaking, and I tried to steady it by bracing my elbow against the table. “You played me, then you tried to play Harpootlian and Szabó both. Then you got caught. It was a bonehead move all the way round, Ellen.”
“So, how’s it gonna be, Natalie? You gonna shoot me for being stupid?”
“No, I’m going shoot you because it’s the only way I can square things with Auntie H, and the only thing that’s gonna keep Szabó from going on the warpath. And because you played me.”
“In my shoes, you’d have done the same thing,” she said. And the way she said it, I could tell she believed what she was saying. It’s the sort of self-righteous bushwa so many grifters hide behind. They might stab their own mothers in the back if they see an angle in it, but, you ask them, that’s jake, cause so would anyone else.
“Is that really all you have to say for yourself?” I asked, and pulled back the slide on the Colt, chambering the first round. She didn’t even flinch…but, wait…I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I ought to begin nearer the beginning.
As it happens, I didn’t go and name the place Yellow Dragon Books. It came with that moniker, and I just never saw any reason to change it. I’d only have had to pay for a new sign. Late in ’28 – right after Arnie “The Brain” Rothstein was shot to death during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel – I accidentally found myself on the sunny side of the proprietress of one of Manhattan’s more infernal brothels. I say accidentally because I hadn’t even heard of Madam Yeksabet Harpootlian when I began trying to dig up a buyer for an antique manuscript, a collection of necromantic erotica purportedly written by John Dee and Edward Kelley some time in the Sixteenth Century. Turns out, Harpootlian had been looking to get her mitts on it for decades.
Now, just how I came into possession of said manuscript, that’s another story entirely, one for some other time and place. One that, with luck, I’ll never get around to putting down on paper. Let’s just say a couple of years earlier, I’d been living in Paris. Truthfully, I’d been doing my best, in a sloppy, irresolute way, to die in Paris. I was holed up
in a fleabag Montmartre boarding house, busy squandering the last of a dwindling inheritance. I had in mind how maybe I could drown myself in cheap wine, bad poetry, Pernod, and prostitutes before the money ran out. But somewhere along the way, I lost my nerve, failed at my slow suicide, and bought a ticket back to the States. And the manuscript in question was one of the many strange and unsavory things I brought back with me. I’d always had a nose for the macabre, and had dabbled – on and off – in the black arts since college. At Radcliffe, I’d fallen in with a circle of lesbyterians who fancied themselves witches. Mostly, I was in it for the sex…but I’m digressing.
A friend of a friend heard I was busted, down and out and peddling a bunch of old books, schlepping them about Manhattan in search of a buyer. This same friend, he knew one of Harpootlian’s clients. One of her human clients, which was a pretty exclusive set (not that I knew that at the time). This friend of mine, he was the client’s lover, and said client brokered the sale for Harpootlian – for a fat ten-percent finder’s fee, of course. I promptly sold the Dee and Kelly manuscript to this supposedly notorious madam whom, near as I could tell, no one much had ever heard of. She paid me what I asked, no questions, no haggling, never mind it was a fairly exorbitant sum. And on top of that, Harpootlian was so impressed I’d gotten ahold of the damned thing, she staked me to the bookshop on Bowery, there in the shadow of the Third Avenue El, just a little ways south of Delancey Street. Only one catch: she had first dibs on everything I ferreted out, and sometimes I’d be asked to make deliveries. I should like to note that way back then, during that long, lost November of 1928, I had no idea whatsoever that her sobriquet, “the Demon Madam of the Lower East Side,” was anything more than colorful hyperbole.
Anyway, jump ahead to a rainy May afternoon, more than six years later, and that’s when I first laid eyes on Ellen Andrews. Well, that’s what she called herself, though later on I’d find out she’d borrowed the name from Claudette Colbert’s character in It Happened One Night. I was just back from an estate sale in Connecticut and was busy unpacking a large crate when I heard the bell mounted above the shop door jingle. I looked up, and there she was, carelessly shaking rainwater from her orange umbrella before folding it closed. Droplets sprayed across the welcome mat and the floor and onto the spines of several nearby books.
The Ape's Wife and Other Stories Page 2
