Speak Easy

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Let’s all feel our hearts crammed in Frankie’s chest, feel us churning up, wheeling, bonging, squishing blood down to our undersides as the lift drops down and the fifteenth floor gets nearer, and with the fifteenth floor Room 1550, and with Room 1550 all those beautiful girls like princesses dancing through their shoes, but especially Zelda Fair, opening the door with that sleepy, heavy, sharp, hot look her eyes have, saying the same thing every day like it’s the first day and she’s never seen an egg before.

  “Oh! You shouldn’t have.”

  And what’s Frankie’s night shift? Never you mind. Mr. Slake signs his bellboy checks every month, but Frankie’s other job doesn’t tally in that dandified ledger with such nice, gold-tipped pages. He punches in at 9 pm on the tenth floor, half way to heaven and halfway to the pit. What he does there pays a whole sight better than chicken farming. And it’s Al who signs those notes, with a signature like a scream in the dark.

  872

  Got all that? Have I dramatised our personae to the hilt? I know it’s tough to keep all the cards in order, my chickies, but I’m doing my best. It’s ok. I wouldn’t leave you in the lurch without a flashlight. Just shine it on over here. Zelda and Ollie and Opal and Olive and the pelican Mr. Puss-Boots, Frankie and Enzo and Murray Keen and Nickel and Dime with their matching dimples, Caspar and poor pissed off Pearl and their Little Cass who thinks blue blood smells like fox farts, Gogol the jaguar, Ogedei the eagle, Marlowe the swell lion, Lily Greer with her vaudeville drag show, and Al, dandy Al in his cherry-cream suit with rosemary in his lapel, Al, who don’t care for the light, waiting down there in the basement for us to come to him. Don’t worry. He’ll keep.

  Harold Kloburcher shacks up in Room 872 with a lady who isn’t his wife, but she isn’t not his wife, either. Miss Georgiette’s actually married to some ether-man down in Baltimore, but she can’t stand the sight of him and he can’t stand the sight of her and there’s only so much marriage you can huff through a wet rag before somebody hits the road. But Georgiette and Harold have their sympatico locked up tight in a jar and they’ve been playing house for coming on ten years now.

  They’re in the same line of work, see. Harry’s a locksmith and Georgie’s a madam. They both let you in when you’re shut out. Oh, Georgie wouldn’t call it that. But everybody knows where to go when you want somebody lying under you who knows how to look like they want to be there. And if you’re a little short on rent and shorter still on the lessons your mama gave you before you lit out for the big city, just head on down to 872 and tell Miss G you’ve got a powerful thirst for some of her darjeeling, sugar, no lemon. She’s got a painting of dogs hunting a unicorn on the wall over the fireplace. Opens on a hinge like the door to paradise. On the backside she’s hung up a broadsheet with all the names and prices and dates available, split into a Girls column and a Boys column, and whaddya know but they’re about the same length. Georgie wouldn’t use your real name—she’s a class act all the way according to her own self, and she learned from her locksmith hunk the sacred trust that goes along with knowing how to get a key in anywhere you like. Discretion, pets. The State Department has fewer code names than Georgiette Boursaw’s unicorn painting. All out of fairy tales, on account of her sweet, soft childhood in Albany, when she loved to read about maidens and towers and horses and dragons, before the man with the fabulous gas and the big slurry fists came to show her how to dance the Sleeping Beauty rag.

  So this week, which is Christmas week 1924, if you’re into that sort of thing, you can have Cinderella for six dollars fifty but keep it out of her mouth, thanks. Or Snow White for a fiver, though you can’t kiss her. Rapunzel’s going for ten bucks even, but it’s a bargain for a contortionist who likes to be choked. Prince Charming will cost you seven, Joringel four, poor wee lamb chop can’t outlast a lit match but oh, those blue eyes will kill you dead. And Clever Jack wants a prince’s ransom, twelve smackers, but you can do anything you like and he’s hung like a Stone Age statue. Oh, you could get it all for less out on the town, but why bother when the Artemisia will send up room service nice and neat?

  Everyone gets a new name in the Artemisia. The front desk is Ellis Island backwards—come Elizabeth Smith and find yourself Licorice Lizzy of the Cigarette Soul before you hit the elevator.

  So imagine Miss Georgie’s eyes when Zelda Fair comes knocking shy, big eyes all haunted-hollow, wearing her respectable clothes, a grey dress with buttons instead of rosettes and rhinestones. Georgie knows that hollow look. That look that says golly gee ma’am I never done this before but I love this damn heap of bricks and I’m just a little short this month… And the money she could get for Zelda, without even haggling! She’s already poured tea and plated out iced cookies and named the girl Gretel in her head before Zelda clears her throat and twists her hands and asks to see Mr. Kloburcher instead. Too bad, Georgie. So sad.

  Harold feels mighty pleased to be called on. He works locks for the hotel and he works on the quiet, too, on the side—sometimes a body doesn’t want the front desk knowing their business. He likes his hush-hush jobs best. He feels like a spy, on one knee, fiddling the tumblers till secrets pop free. He looks Miss Z up and down and figures he’ll make a roast chicken tonight, to feed Georgie’s disappointment. But now Zelda Fair’s looking at him with that face, that tea-cake chin, that gin-sloe smile, and her throat’s all red above her collarbone, which is, Harold guesses, how somebody like her blushes when they blush at all.

  “Tell us all your troubles, sweetheart,” he says in his best plummy grandfather voice that practically lights a pipe with its vowels. “You wanna try locksmithing this week? Little fingers like yours, could be your Goodies in spades.”

  Zelda laughs, but it’s a little, short laugh, the kind that isn’t really a laugh at all. Just punctuation. “Sometimes funny things happen in this world, don’t they, Mr. K? I mean, the world’s so damn big everything’s bound to happen that can happen, and probably some things that can’t.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And when funny things happen, you just have to go along, don’t you? Because they might never happen again and you’ll have missed the joke of it, missed the fun, and then when you’re old and your kittens ask you what you did when the world had its glad rags on, you won’t have nothing to say, will you?”

  “Honey, I don’t follow you.”

  “You need a drink, baby girl?” Georgiette asks, just as sweet as a pie filled with aunties. “I think we got some anise in the cupboard.”

  Zelda takes it in a little green crystal glass and for a second she’s so dazzled by the winter light streaming through the window streaming through the glass and streaming onto her knuckles like emerald licorice rings that she forgets to talk and her mind whangs off thinking about how anise ought to be black, or at lease purple, the way licorice is, but it’s as white as a window pane…

  Georgie’s talk bubbles all over, bicarbonate of gossip. “I got it straight from the source, no need to worry, lovie. Nothing foul in there. Harry, did you hear three people died of that ginger poison at Bill Radner’s jake joint last week? I don’t even look at the stuff unless I saw the man downstairs tap it with his own hand. You drink up, Zelda. Your color’s out.”

  “I’m sorry!” Zelda snaps back into Room 872 and shoots back her licorice like water. “I’m sorry. I feel like I’m made of paper these days. Gotta pile rocks on me to keep me from flying away.”

  “Red meat,” Georgie prescribes. She knows from paper girls. Does she ever. “Red meat and brown liquor. Roots you to the earth. Keeps you hot. I’ve got some steaks in the icebox, dear. I’ll wrap them up for you. Just fry them with a little butter, two minutes a side. Eat up all the fat, too, suck the bones. I’ll know if you don’t.”

  Zelda tries to refuse but Georgiette would mother a hole in the wall. That’s what comes of Albany and Buffalo and slurping down a thousand stories where nobody’s got a mother worth spitting on. She comes back with a brown paper parcel and a little round
silver flask. Zelda’s in the middle of saying:

  “…up in my room. Just come look. I can pay. I can! I fixed Mrs. Acosta’s stove last week. I’m flush. Well, golly! My Daddy taught me how to make things work when they quit on you. He wouldn’t have anyone saying he raised a Helpless Hattie. That’s what he called girls who only knew how to be pretty. Now, being pretty’s plenty hard, but nobody’s Daddy since the dawn of time ever cottoned on to that—there I go again, blowing away! Just come, Mr. K. Come look and if you can’t do it no harm’s done.”

  Harold the spy lives for a hard lock. Georgie hands over her love wrapped in brown paper. Blood seeps through the bottom. They don’t see it drip, but they feel it.

  1090

  Frankie Key spiffs himself up real good for the evening. He takes a change of clothes up to the tenth floor. He gets off early tonight. Free and clear by midnight and he feels just as fine as candy about it. Al gave him a new suit, and boy, a suit from Al is prettier than a girl’s ballgown. No boy of mine should have to slum a party in a paper bag like yours, he said. Where’d you get it, you uncle’s funeral when you were fourteen? Come ’ere, kid. You look like a fifty-pound nun in a ten-pound habit.

  Frankie touches it while he sets out the tools of this particular job. She’ll be impressed. Anybody would be. The suit’s this kind of grey that’s barely grey at all, but lavender and blue and a little green, too. It shines a little when you move in it, and he does plan to move. It’s got a tie the hot, heady color of the bougainvillea in his mother’s garden way back. Ruby chip cufflinks and fennel flowers in the buttonhole. And if those shoes aren’t actual goatskin, Frankie here will eat his book.

  Oh yeah, Frankie’s writing a book. Everybody’s writing a book in this joint. It’s the thing to do. Furrow your brow over pages and pull your best Keats-face, your best long-tooth Joyce-mug and the girlies just fall all over you. The lads, too. It’s a 100% kind of magic, works on everyone. Make me a character, won’t you? I was just born for the page. Make me art. Make me alive. Make me real ’cause you’re only real if somebody’s talking about you, and fiction’s the best kind of gossip there is. Every time some sad sack in the Artemisia thinks say, I oughta write a book, an angel falls flat on its face on 42nd Street and gets a ticket for jaywalking.

  But Frankie’s not bad. Mostly he’s been writing detective stories up till now. It does nice things to his mind, like working a puzzle backwards, pulling out pieces one at a time until he’s the only one who knows the picture. Besides, stories that start with a dead girl sell. He doesn’t like that. His mother wouldn’t like it. But it’s true. He’ll try something else, someday. Something smart and cold and hard in all the right places. He just hasn’t found his big thing yet. He will. He knows it. Boys always know their big damn deal is right around the corner, sucking cigarettes and panting their name. But right now the murder racket snags him bylines and smart’s not doing the trick. So up with blood and down with melancholy! Yes sir, hack those throats, fire those guns, furrow those Holmesy brows! It’s easy to be lazy when lazy keeps you in gin. Frankie’s not monogamous when it comes to detectives. No Poirot or Spade for him. He likes to be a new man every time he punches a typewriter. And honestly, his night-gig will keep him in stories till he’s out of teeth and time.

  And what’s his gig? Frankie’s a tube-man.

  When Mr. Slake rustled himself up a hotel, he kitted her out with the best and newest of everything. Why not? The best is better, isn’t it? New beats old in everything but wine and compound interest. Frankie’d never seen anything like the tubes when he slid into home in that fine front lobby. Pneumatic tubes, all through the place like veins through an elephant, opening up into every room with little brass cubby-doors and long glass pipes. If you could see through walls, you’d see this fantastic glass spider hugging onto the whole damn castle. And in the pipes? Air rushing, rushing all the time, air so beefy it’ll carry a capsule from one floor to another, a capsule like a crystal ball, stuffed with whatever you want. Messages, trinkets, lipstick handkerchiefs, tickets, keys, candies, paints, pens—but mostly messages. He has no idea how it works. It could be a great big green-assed genie puffing into a hookah in the basement for all he knows. Frankie doesn’t use it himself—but he knows the score.

  See, Al showed up on the roof one morning. Just leaning against the chicken coop in his cotton candy suit like it was the finest throne in England. He tossed an egg up in the air and caught it and said: heya, Frances, how’d you like to make some real scratch? And any Buffalo boy knows when the big man says he wants a favor you just better hop.

  So, this is what Frankie does for Al: he sits in Room 1090, not even a suite, just a single halfway between the roof and the basement. And whenever a crystal ball comes flying up the chute, he grabs it, jots down what’s inside in a big green book, then sends it back on its way. If it’s a letter, he copies it out. If it’s a trinket, he describes it down to the gold chain and the porcelain handle and records the to and the from. Everything passes through Room 1090. Everything goes in the book. Frankie has nice handwriting. Frankie has a tidy little heart. Frankie assumes he’s not the only one. Some cat like him on every floor, most likely.

  These are some of the things that pass through Frankie like a like that lady on the fortune telling card, passing water from one jug to another.

  Send up the Matchstick Girl and Iron Hans tonight, won’t you, Mme. Georgiette? After supper, if you please. —E. F. Rm 1216

  You owe me twenty bucks on account I chewed off Bobby Smile’s ear for you last week and if you don’t pay up I could do yours for free. —J.W. Rm 401

  Mr. Bessler, a fella got me in some awful trouble and he ain’t never gonna marry me ’cause his name goes up in lights every night and mine goes down in the dirt. I got six dollars saved and I know you can do it quick. —S.A. Rm 244

  I’ll need a case of rum tonight, Raspy, four bottles champ. & two vermouth. Just a quiet night in with friends. —Q. T. L. Rm 1967

  Don’t you love me anymore? —O. C. Rm 1550

  If you send me another letter I shall have you evicted. This one I shall burn. I advise you to do the same. —B. R. Rm 1388

  Of course, baby. Of course I love you. Come down tonight. I’m sorry. —E.B. Rm 212

  Miss Lily, I cannot abide another night without you. My wife is away. Come up. Wear your boy’s clothes. I shall kiss your feet. I shall kiss your everything. —C.A.S. Rm 2064

  1709

  The big party’s on seventeen tonight—a double birthday for King Lear and the Mad Mauler, a silver screen slickie and the heavyweight champion of the world. Though how the Big M crunched that poor bastard’s face in Toledo nobody can figure. Unless somebody loaded down his gloves something special. Unless 1919 was a mighty fine year for crossing palms in the Artemisia lobby while the seals barked like three stupid fates with one beach ball between ’em. Never you mind, I guess.

  By the time Frankie shows, it’s gimlets and Gomorrah up there. The Slovenian tenor who made such a thumping glory of Carmen last month plays Apollo, zinging arrows from a serious mister of a bow, whacking his shots into the moose-head hanging over the elevator, popping the lights in the hall, telling filthy jokes about bear-fucking to girls on roller skates. His laugh blows through three octaves. Doors are flung open, people pouring in and out, the whole floor shaking, hopping, dancing, hollering. Through one door Frankie K can see a naked girl standing in a washtub pouring champagne over her head and reciting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner while everybody throws dimes over their shoulders like she’s the goddamned Trevi Fountain. King Lear, wearing his prop crown, has Cordelia bent over a chest of drawers in the back bedroom, huffing Now, gods, stand up for bastards! while he does his big scene on her back.

  On the floor in 1790, the Mad Mauler’s own pad, there’s six or seven cats playing dice on the rug. Frankie looks closer. It’s no game he knows. Bone dice. Burned-in pips. One girl looks up at some player who’s got fifty years over her and hisses: double fiv
e and the antelope burns, old man. Her face looks like she swallowed a limelight when she says it. Frankie shivers.

  He taps antelope-girl’s shoulder. She looks up at him, all milk of innocence.

  “Have you seen Zelda?” he asks.

  “Who?”

  “Zelda. Zelda Fair. About this high, short black hair, smile like a punch in the gut?”

  “Oh. No, Mister, I haven’t seen her all night. I’m sure she’s here, though. Who’d miss this out? At one o’clock the Mauler’s gonna go a round with that fat man from the pictures. Don’t you run off! You’ll find her.”

  “I think I saw her in the washroom,” grunts one of the other dice-jockeys, who just this morning bought the fastest race-horse in Australia and put him on a boat to California. “If you’re missing a girl, always look in the washroom, I always say. The dame’s choice locale for passing out, hopping up, getting hers, bawling like a dog or gossiping like a goddamn parakeet.”

  Frankie trips over a bottle of Pernod, a tophat, a wolfhound, a stone-drunk textile heir, and a child star with blond curls like cinnamon buns on his way to the bedroom-sized washroom of Room 1709. He expects the door to be locked but it swings open, not even latched. It’s empty in there: pink tile with green chevrons, three oval mirrors with electric lights and gold frames to make your face a painting, hart’s-tongue ferns in bronze vases. Panther-skin to dry your footsies. And a grand tub, lizard-clawfoot, hacked out of a hunk of malachite hauled all the way back from the Congo by a fella who said he was coming to cure malaria. Amethyst taps shaped like rhino-heads, one grimacing for cold, the other panting for hot. That’s where he finds her, Zelda Fair, hiding out, lying in the bath in her oyster-shimmer dress, strings of black pearls floating in the water all around her, stockings shriveled round her toes, a flapper mermaid caught with her fins out.