by Alyssa Cole
The women in the audience looked anywhere but at her. The floor, the stage, or at the women beside them as they whispered behind their hands.
“This is really not the forum for such matters,” Delta said, her color high. “Once we win the right to vote for all women, we’ll be able to better use our power to uplift—”
“Uplift? You mean the same patronizing lies women have been fed by men for generations? That we’ve been fed by Whites since the end of the war?” Bertha let out a bark of a laugh as she began making her way out of her row, her skirts grazing the knees of the scandalized women closest to her. She didn’t know why she had wasted her day trying to fit in with these women.
She got to the aisle and turned back to the stage. “Keep your uplift, Mrs. Henderson. I wasn’t asking how you could help these women, but how they—we—could help you. If you couldn’t figure that out, then we have nothing else to discuss.”
She didn’t march out of the room, but walked slowly, confidently, her hips swinging slightly too wide for good taste. As she was heading out the door, one person began clapping. Her head swiveled in their direction to meet their derision, but when she saw who it was, she realized it wasn’t mockery. Seated in the back row, wearing a full-length fur coat and a smart hat that Bertha was sure cost more than she could imagine, was Miss Q, reigning queen of the numbers game. Miss Q hadn’t dressed to accommodate the sensibilities of the suffragettes. When you were as powerful as her, you didn’t have to.
Miss Q spoke out against social injustice and unfair conditions, and she didn’t mince words. Anyone who had seen her ads demanding police reform and community improvement in the Negro newspapers knew that. Bertha nodded in the woman’s direction as she passed through the door, and Miss Q nodded back, a smirk on her face.
Bertha kept her same measured pace as she walked out of the building, and as she walked blindly down the crowded streets, tilting her head at people who called out her name. She was perfectly calm and pleasant, save for the helpless anger that was only expressed in the exaggerated sway of her hips, and how tightly her gloved fists were clenched.
The sun was lowering in the sky—her entire day had been lost to the beauty salon, all to make herself presentable, but flat hair and a stuffy dress hadn’t changed who she was. There was no time for rest, either. It was straight to the Cashmere to begin preparing for the Saturday evening crowd. She would have to make sure the performances were lined up perfectly to give the audience the best bang for their buck, that the food orders had come in, that the Gallucci’s had delivered the ice blocks for the night, and the cops had been paid off. That her bouncers had an updated list of which men not to let inside, no matter what they said—the Cashmere had a rep for keeping its girls safe now that Bertha was in charge, and that was something she wouldn’t slack on.
After doing all that, she would have to prep for her own performance. It had once been comforting to slip into her old, familiar stage persona, but just the thought of it fatigued her now. She wanted nothing more than a finger of scotch and her bed, but that wouldn’t happen until the sun came up.
She entered the Cashmere through the alley that ran behind the building, using the back door that led into the kitchen.
Her chef, Cora, was already at work prepping everything she would need for the night. The woman’s huge stomach poked out from beneath a now too-tight chef’s jacket, reminding Bertha that she would soon need a new cook in addition to a new dishwasher.
“Has anyone stopped by, Cora?”
“Only Officer O’Donnell, looking for his envelope.” She sucked her teeth. “You would think the police didn’t have a payroll how often they show up here with their hands out.”
Shit.
She pulled her pocket watch out and checked the time. The new dishwasher should have arrived already. When the merchant who provided her dance costumes had visited the day before to deliver a new skirt, he’d said he had a man for her. Mr. Khan was usually reliable, but if he didn’t come through she was going to be in a hard spot.
“Miss Bertha?”
She breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of Ali Khan’s distinct accent, a mix of Southern drawl and the lyrical cadence of his native country. She turned, allowing the brown-skinned, older man the slightest hint of a smile as she inclined her head toward him.
“Mr. Khan, how are you?” She shook his hand, as she did everyone’s: brief, fast, and with enough pressure to pre-empt any they might exert on her’s.
“Good, good. Heading back to New Orleans tomorrow,” he said. His face lit up, and she envied him the brief burst of happiness that came from knowing he would see his wife and children soon. The man only stopped by a few times a year, but she knew everything about his family.
“I’m sure Sable and the boys are looking forward to your return.”
Ali chuckled. “Sable is looking forward to having help running the shop! And maybe my esteemed presence, yes. But before that, I have another delivery for you. Asho, Amir.”
She heard a sigh come from the proximity of the back door, and not a wistful one. It was a sound of deep aggravation, the same she emitted before sitting down before a pile of paperwork or, lately, before donning her skirts and smile and stepping onto the stage.
The door, which had been left ajar, pushed open, and Bertha felt her control drop for just an instant. She’d expected someone young and ridiculous, or older and fatherly; just about anyone other than the dark, brooding man who stepped into the doorway with a scowl on his face.
His hair was inky black, longish and thick. It was brushed back from his face, revealing sharp cheekbones shaded by five o’clock shadow and full lips—dusky pink against his golden brown skin. His eyes were a deep, dark brown, with long lashes that seemed at odds with the intensity of his gaze. Said gaze passed over her, then away disdainfully, reminding Bertha that if she didn’t constantly lay down the path for how people, men especially, treated her, they’d see her as the path itself and walk right over her.
He said something in their language to Mr. Khan, then his gaze drifted from her face to the door behind her shoulder, as if looking for someone else. She’d seen that look before; he was expecting a man to come out and talk to him.
She pursed her lips and made a show of stepping closer to him, walking a circle around him and inspecting him like a cow at the market—the same way she’d been inspected by men with promises of work when she’d shown up in New York, ready to put her past behind her and start fresh. Audition after audition, each rejection more stinging and each theater more low brow until she’d landed at an uptown cabaret, with the manager licking his lips and saying he thought she’d fit in just fine.
But that was the past. This was her joint; she was the boss now and any man who worked for her would respect that.
“Does he speak English, this Amir?” She stopped in front of him and met his gaze, letting hers dip just a bit when his lips pulled to the side in annoyance.
“He does, this Amir,” came the reply, in an accent entirely different from Mr. Khan, sharpened with a crisp British enunciation. “And this Miss Hines? Apni Bangla bolte paren?”
“Amir,” Ali said, shooting him a quelling look. “Miss Hines is a fine woman. Bhadrobhabey kotha bolo onar shathey.”
“Are we going to have a problem?” she asked. She could have asked herself the same thing. Her interest in men had been primarily business, even now that her business had become selling drinks and entertainment instead of her body. There had always been a sort of detachment, even when she fell apart in a man’s arms—even when the men weren’t paying. She had stopped dating entirely since taking over the Cashmere. Nights on the town had developed a different edge of tension; she’d often felt like a plump chicken out with a hungry farmer, never sure when he’d reveal his knife. She didn’t need a man trying to cut in on her business, and she’d had more than enough of being told what to do. The only men who interested her now were the Cashmere’s customers and the dead presidents o
n the scratch they handed her.
This Amir, though. The fact that she hadn’t yet kicked him out proved she would have to be very careful with him.
That tempting mouth of his pulled up into a smile, but his eyes were still as hard as stone. “You won’t have any problems from me. Just tell me what I need to do—in English—and I’ll do it.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” she said. She took another step toward him, just to see him frown again. They weren’t close enough to dance, but she felt a pleasant tingle go through her at even that proximity.
Careful.
“Will you have a problem handling any particular food products?” she asked. “Beef?”
His brows went up a little, then receded back down into his glower. “I’m Muslim, not Hindu. I can’t imagine eating pork is a job requirement, so as I said, no problems from me.”
His response was curt, his shoulders and neck tensed as if he were straining against some challenge. She tried not to take it personally. Men always seemed to think she was challenging them, just by operating in a world outside the one located under their thumb. She kept her expression bland, letting her gaze flick over him assessingly as the silence dragged out one beat, then another.
“Well, let me know ahead of time if you need accommodation for fasting, prayer, or anything else that might come up,” she said. Something struck her then. “You know what this place is, yes?”
He opened his mouth and closed it, and his gaze dropped to the ground.
He knew.
“It’s a business,” she continued, “and if you have a problem with any aspect of my business, let me know now. I don’t want to be out a dishwasher in the middle of dinner service if you suddenly find your feathers ruffled by a girl in a short dress.”
His gaze came up to meet hers, and there was that burning, insolent look again. “I need work.”
“And I need a worker. It seems we have come to an agreement.”
She held out her hand and he took it; he didn’t try to crush her hand as she imagined he might, but waited to see how much pressure she exerted and exerted the exact same amount back. Warmth surged through her at the press of his palm against hers, delicious, unexpected, and unwanted. She squeezed a bit harder, then pulled her hand away, embarrassed at the sheen of sweat forming on her upper lip. It must have been the heat from the stove.
“Cora can you show him what to do real quick?” she asked.
“Sure,” Cora said, breezily. “Not like I have a busy night to prep for.”
“I have some bangles for you to look at before I go,” Ali said, drawing her attention back to him. “They’re very nice, and reserved for my clients in New Orleans, so you can be the only woman in New York with them!”
“You bring me the most exciting things,” she said, glancing at Amir. He turned to face Cora. “Come to my office and let’s see what you’ve got.”
Ali talked about something or other as they made their way through the club and then the hall that led to her office, but Bertha wasn’t listening hard. She was busy hoping the fact that her hand still tingled something fierce didn’t mean a damn thing.
Chapter 2
Amir didn’t know why he’d let Ali talk him into this. He’d told the man he was done with restaurants, after being fired from his last three jobs. He loved working in a kitchen, but it seemed employers didn’t like it very much when you pointed out the unsafe, unfair, or indecent ways in which they treated their employees. The British officers aboard the Kandahar hadn’t liked it, and the head chef at the Drake Hotel had liked it even less.
Amir stepped back as dishwater sloshed over the side of the sink, then sighed. He had always been considered theta, and his parents had warned that his willfulness would get him in trouble one day. His willfulness had gotten him to America, and if this country wasn’t trouble, he didn’t know what was.
He felt swindled, like a child who had listened to rupkatha before bed and come to believe the stories were real. But Amir now knew that virtue wasn’t always rewarded and evil sometimes did win the day. He’d witnessed it as his family’s land had diminished, plot by plot, victim of East India Company law. He’d seen it in Calcutta, in the faces of the poor on the street and the illiterate sailors who filled the boarding houses.
America was supposed to be different.
You should just go back. Like a dog, with his tail between his legs.
When he’d left his village for the port city of Calcutta, drawn by the possibility of work on a British steamer and tales of adventure and prosperity in far-away places, people had expected that he’d soon return humbled and ready to take a wife and settle on the family farmland. It wasn’t that they wished him ill. It was simply that they’d seen so many of the other men who spent years in Calcutta, building up debt to the ghat sharengs who housed them and the sharengs who were the key to getting hired for an outgoing crew, return in the same manner.
But Amir hadn’t been deterred. He’d grown up with stories from Raahil Chacha, who had made Amir study English grammar and learn about men with strange names like Marx and Engels while his cousins played. His uncle had left Bengal for adventure, despite the academic success that had already laid the foundation for a promising future. His family had considered it a betrayal, but Raahil had seen places like Morocco and Portugal and England with his own eyes, tasted their foods and mingled with their people. He told Amir all kinds of stories, except for the ones that would explain the burns on his arms and why he sometimes went quiet for days. Raahil’s stories had driven Amir from his town in search of more.
In Calcutta, he’d gotten a job in a restaurant near the docks and immersed himself in the community of seamen, first teaching the illiterate men at his boarding house the basics of reading and writing and eventually, in a series of events composed of happenstance and Allah’s will, organizing against unfair conditions. He’d fallen in with a group of young Socialists, drawn to them by the ideas that his Chacha had instilled in him. He hadn’t meant to get involved in such activities, but watching the injustice that surrounded him everywhere in the crowded port city spurred him to help where he could. After two years of such work, he’d been assigned to the crew of the Kandahar, likely so he would no longer be a bother to the ghat sharengs as they grifted money from desperate men.
They certainly don’t seem to mind that you never came back. While the sharengs did not seem to feel his loss, his family did. His cousins with no land of their own had taken the management of his, but the longer he stayed away, the murkier the situation became. In the last few weeks, Amir had begun to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t time for him to return.
When he’d jumped ship in New York, fed up with the hellish conditions the British thought suitable for their Indian crewmen, he’d thought he’d make something of himself in America. He’d been on the ships for three years, and each time they stopped in New York he’d felt the city thrum in his blood. To a village boy raised on a smallholding farm in Bengal, the tall buildings and seething streets had been like walking through a dream he hadn’t remembered having, even after the glorious hustle and bustle of Calcutta. He had been sure that New York was a place where he could make something of himself—outside the bounds of the British imperialist box—and return triumphant. He would buy back the plots of land his family had been forced to sell in increments as the zamindars collected their debts, and use his American-made wealth to thumb his nose at the sahebs and their rules.
But here he was, two years later, working the lowest job possible in a place of ill repute. The women passing in and out of the kitchen in their make-up and revealing dresses were certainly selling something more than drinks, and music and shouts filled the entire place, growing louder as the night progressed. Bertha had stopped in and told him if any strange White men tried to enter through the back door to come get her immediately, leaving him on edge and worried about raids that could have him on a boat back to Bengal. What had he gotten himself into?
One who goe
s to Laanka turns into Ravaan, his neighbor had chided at the celebration before he left for Calcutta, and his aunties had agreed. If they could see the company he kept now, they’d quickly join his parents in the afterlife, just to pass on news of his shame.
“Chicken fried steak, order up!” Cora called out. He looked over at the cook as she wiped sweat away from her brow and moved on to the next dish, her belly bumping the plate she’d set on the counter. Perspective coated the burn of his irritation, calming him. It chafed to be demoted to a dish scrubber while the tools of his trade were at hand, but at least he wasn’t carrying a live, kicking thing in his belly while doing the work. Besides, he needed the money.
He’d been steadily building his savings, despite a few setbacks, after the last of which his enraged boss had threatened to report him as an undocumented alien—the recent immigration act had given many men a trump card over him, something Amir resented keenly. He had left Bengal to find himself and America had told him what he was: “undesirable.” In the eyes of the American people, he was no different than a criminal or beggar. An exotic disease that might infect the country from within. He couldn’t vote, own land, or naturalize; his life was dependent on people deciding not to report him or taking the risk of hiring him. He thought back to the way Bertha had looked down her nose at him, though he’d felt something other than resentment stir in him then.
Na, Amir. There was no point in thinking about her full lips pressing together as she’d inspected him like one of the British officers before he’d boarded their ships. When Ali Khan had told him what kind of place the Cashmere was and that it was owned by a woman, he’d expected someone frivolous, gaudy; it hadn’t even registered to him that the woman in the kitchen could be her. He’d thought her just another witness to his shame. But Bertha Hines had wasted no time in correcting his misconception; she had been sharp, all business.
