The Crimson Shaw

by Elyse Lortz

  “So ya made it, Kid. Good. A man who keeps his word is one I can trust.” His dark eyes flickered briefly over my shoulder. “Where’s McCormic?”

  “He couldn’t make it. Last minute business deal. But he gave me a check on his behalf and said he would get more if he needed to.” What I had worked so diligently to lose from my American habits now returned in full force. Granted, I was glad to have them as I played this fatal role, as long as I was able to brush them once more beneath the carpet when I was to return to Harrison’s theatre. Cohen smiled and patted me on the shoulder before nearly sprinting off toward the hallway. Only once had I seen a man so desperate to wash his hands; a germaphobe tucked away in the hills of Switzerland. However, as Keane rightly observed, this was different. There was a separation, for Cohen seemed not so concerned about falling ill as he was to commit himself to the practice of scrubbing his hands raw.

  Sam Barker positioned us in a circle along the various chairs and settees, rather like a class of overgrown children smoking and drinking and talking and laughing. And all about things that would not matter the next day. The young host seemed to enjoy this intimately, as though he had done something profound for this gathering of businessmen. There were all sorts of money; old money, new money, and even those who had the slightest possibility of stumbling into money somewhere along the road. The man smoking those horribly Indian cigars stood lazily on the other end of the fireplace, slurring out some drowsy words about how he hoped the little meeting wouldn’t take too long because he had a girl waiting in some motel. She charged by the hour. The rest of the group cackled their approval of his situation, and I—a person who had created a sound sum of money by setting myself far away from society—suddenly regretted having not been made by God to be more sociable. At least Keane understood at least a little of humanity and was able to enter and exit each scene of life with the same gentlemanly grace I admired. I had none of this. Looking back, I could understand it was in part because of my youth, and a person must never feel guilty for the small selection of years they set aside.

  And yet I did.

  As many of the other men muttered jokes and profanities, I felt increasingly ashamed to have been young and not quite having swallowed enough of my own life to understand the great moral travesty of theirs. Just as my mind had defensively numbed itself from words demeaning to my concealed femininity, Mickey Cohen entered the room.

  And everything stopped.

  Well, perhaps it didn’t stop, per se, but a ripple of silence swept over the room; engulfing all language in his presence. It took several minutes to realise there was another man behind him. It was even longer before my mind was able to comprehend that the man was a priest.

  I was Catholic. I had been born Catholic. And, in the end, I would die Catholic. But such did not mean I was unaware of those other religions. In my travels I had feasted with Arabs and Monarchs, celebrated the Passover with a Jewish family, and prayed in tongues I knew not. I was the first to stand when he entered the room, and the last to sit when he bade us to do so. He introduced himself as Father James Kennedy. The long, black cassock he wore jerked stiffly as he spoke.

  “Mr. Cohen has kindly invited me to speak to you fine gentlemen about an orphanage our parish has run for the last seventy years. It is a good establishment; large enough to house over two dozen unfortunate youths. We educate them in a few classrooms we were able to build into the house itself; however, our congregation is not a large one, nor do they have the funds necessary to sustain such a program.”

  A general succession of nods and sympathetic murmurs arose from the other men. Mickey Cohen smiled. “Right, so what’ll it be? Jack, you go first. Name your donation.”

  “Six hundred dollars.” Cohen’s smile faltered and he wagged his head.

  “That’s not enough, Jack. I know you can do a lot better than that. Now, say it again, but a better number.”

  “Three thousand.”

  “Much better. Stoney?”

  “Sixty-three hundred.”

  “Good. Hank?” And so it went; one after another. If the chosen amount wasn’t to his liking, Cohen had the man raise it until it was at least an honest man’s yearly wages. After the first victim; however, he had little trouble coaxing a generous donation from each man. At last, it was my turn.

  “Well, wadaya say, Kid?” Cohen asked; his smile more expectant than it was threatening.

  I named the amount.

  The men gaped at me. The priest’s eyes grew wide. Mickey’s smile only broadened.

  I stood and edged over toward the stunned priest, taking out Keane’s enormous check and adding an equally abundant amount of paper cash. In total, our twenty thousand completed the deal with a sound sixty thousand dollars, which Cohen promptly doubled. One hundred twenty thousand dollars, and we had only been there only a little over two hours. In the time to follow, Sam Barker and Father Kennedy retreated from the house and the drinks and tobacco returned in full force. A few of the business men wandered off to the billiard room, leaving me to face a man I found as equally curious as I did frightening. He had killed men, no doubt: shot dead in cold blood. Perhaps our greatest similarity is that we had both seen death. His suffering; however, had been planned by a murderous heart. Mine was the wicked hand of chance. He motioned for me to sit on one of the low armchairs while he took his natural perch along the edge of a sofa. One was never to doubt his dominance in a room. Perhaps he had been a king in the east, but here he thought himself a god.

  “So tell me, where’d ya get all that dough. I didn’t make that much boxing even on good fights.” I pulled out a cigarette and rolled it between my fingers. I was beginning to understand Keane’s adoration of the little things.

  “Boxing isn’t all I did. Writing can make a pretty penny, ‘specially if you have a good story.” The cigarette nearly fell from my hand when I instinctively dropped an ‘e’ from my words. My midnight hour was drawing near. Soon the illusion of English heritage would fall away even from myself, and a rotting pumpkin would forever take its place.

  God, this needed to end.

  Soon.

  Mickey grinned calmly; folding his meaty hands over his legs and edging eagerly forward.

  “So you’re in the media?” I waved a lit match in some vague attempt at casual ease. Casual ease. Can one ever find comfort in the presence of a murderer?

  “Something like that. Saw you in the papers a few times. Good stories, those. Keep it up and you’ll be as big as Capone.”

  “Bigger, Kid, if fate pays its dues.” And I suspected it often did. “You gotta take what you can when you can. No questions. No hesitation. Just take it.”

  Carpe Diem.

  Seize the day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I DIDN’T BOTHER ENTERING my own hotel room, but instead went next door to Keane’s. He was unceremoniously hunched over the little desk never made for a man more than one and a half meters, let alone two inches over six feet. I threw myself dramatically onto the sofa and tossed an arm over my eyes.

  “Brendan Keane, you are an awful, horrible man and I hate you terribly.” My companion tried to swing his long legs around to face me, but the quick motion became a slow, methodic task of extracting his knees from beneath the wooden table and stretching them out straight as he twisted his torso in my direction. His thin, silver spectacles he occasionally wore slipped along the bridge of his nose. “I hate you horribly.” I announced again, with a little more theatrical conviction than the last time, before allowing my voice to falter and fall to a whisper. “I hate you for what you have done to me. I find cigarettes are bearable: even, heaven forbid, enjoyable. Especially compared to Indian cigars.” The chuckle began as a thin wisp of understanding, growing louder as the full weight of my words settled over the room. Keane’s voice only bothered to appear when his laughter sputtered between a few short breaths.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever smoked Indian cigars.”

  “And, if I ha
ve any say in it, you never will. Here,” I reached a hand into my jacket pocket and threw the package of cigarettes at Keane’s chest before laying back and dropping my hat over my face. “Take them, and may you have more luck with them than I do.” The package disappeared beneath a pile of papers etched in his handwriting as my companion stood; gradually working the knots out of his shoulders. There was the soft thud of agile footsteps blended with the rustle of those horrid first drafts. He pinched the hat from my head, glanced down at my face, and dropped it again.

  “Have you eaten? Doesn’t matter, lunch or dinner. Did you have either? I thought not. Come.” I let my hat fall to the floor in time to catch Keane’s reflection in the mirror as he did up his waistcoat buttons and shrugged into an elegant, dark jacket. The simple necktie, which had been dangling from his neck, had been replaced by one infinitely more obnoxious in both color and pattern. It fairly exploded from the dark contrast of yet another new suit. Modest, but expensive. Dark, but not depressingly so. I caught the first breath of a sigh as he adjusted his lapels and did up the jacket’s bright buttons. “I shall be glad to return to my tweeds.” He announced with a final glance toward the looking glass as he cajoled me out the door.

  As I had come to expect carefully chosen restaurants accentuated with fine dishes and old wine, it was rather a shock when Keane vered off the paved walkways toward a small deli. I waited outside and watched the infamous oddities of the world up until the moment my companion reemerged with a paper bag clutched in his hand. With the other set of fingers, he casually steered me toward a nearby park. The first flickers of evening had just begun to shift along the green grasses. As Keane farely knocked me onto a poor old bench, the results of our last visit to the point of imagined paradise had ended in frustration, irritation, and confusion. But that couldn’t very well happen twice. Certainly not. We were—in all eyes, save our own—two men. Two normal, ordinary men. Keane tossed the parcel onto the bench and lowered himself beside it, peeling away the paper wrappings to reveal two grand sandwiches, well off with slices of thick beef and cheese. While I tore into mine ravenously, my companion was infinitely more patient, chewing thoughtfully as though each bite was an algebraic equation to be meticulously solved. He had barely made a dent in his meal when I paused to mop my hands on the oily, white creases of the wax paper.

  “How was the business meeting? Any unusual psychiatrists?”

  “None.” I started a little, believing he was joking, or at least trying to coax me toward some tempting jest of fate, which might finish with some hilarious tale of a mad scholar with long, wild hair and a funny mustache.

  “None?” I repeated. “Surely there was someone. Never have those conventions occurred without some exciting tale. How could there be none?” Keane glanced at his sandwich then squinted up toward the darkening sky, and I immediately knew whatever he was about to say would have little to do with the subject of psychoanalysis or dedicated intellectuals.

  “Strange how easily things can be hidden, yet they are so bloody difficult to find.” I almost choked. He had not fallen from the country of conversation, nor even the continent.

  He had fallen from the earth.

  “What the devil do you mean by that? I’m not denying that there may be some truth in that statement, but what does that have to do with meetings and—” I stopped, catching the tilt to my companion’s long head and the glimmer as he glanced at me from the sides of those two twinkling oceans. I shut my mouth hard and, once my poor abused teeth had ceased their rattling, I opened it again; my voice slowly unfurling itself into a single, coherent sentence.

  “You didn’t go to that business meeting, did you?” A cigarette appeared at his lips.

  “Lawrence, would you believe I spent the better part of this afternoon within a mile of yourself.”

  “You couldn’t have. I would have recognised you.” Would I? Was I able to recall every muddled face wandering about in the tobacco haze? Scars may be replicated and added just above real skin. Facial hair may be glued. Theatrics could go unnoticed.

  “Not if I was a floor below you.” Keane stated simply, his voice muffling slightly as he held the cigarette in his mouth as he fished about for a pack of matches. “There is no doubt in my mind that those photographs are somewhere in that house; however, where is something I am having a bloody hard time finding.” It was difficult to imagine my companion having a ‘bloody hard time’ of anything. There had never been a failure to him. A real failure. Something that was so horrible it made me hate him. It is incredibly—damnably—hard to hate someone who makes the world a bit more logical. A bit more secure. A bit more substantial.

  Beyond Keane, it was insanity.

  KEANE AND I HAD MADE plans to return to the noise and bustle of the casino late that night. As usual, this theatrical debut required another one of Keane’s new and extravagant suits to be whittled down to accommodate my smaller, and far less masculine, frame. It also meant a great deal of poorly concealed sulking from my generous comrade. I adjusted my silk necktie.

  “Really, Keane, if you are going to be so intolerable about this, stop buying such expensive suits.”

  “Leslie McCormic would not wear anything less than the best.” My companion declared with a villainous wave of his comb. His jacket had been laid neatly over the back of a chair, leaving him in his white shirtsleeves with black suspenders crossing his back and climbing over his shoulders. God, even those must have cost enough to feed a family of seven. The comb dove toward his head. “Devon English, however—”

  “What about Devon? Wouldn’t he wear nice clothes as well?”

  “A former boxer?” A rough scoff tumbled to the floor. “Surely you jest.” I finished tying up the laces to one shoe, pausing briefly to glance up at my companion’s back.

  “Come now. They could be hand me downs from some well-off friend.” Keane swiveled around like an office chair, with the same grace as well oiled wheels. I couldn’t quite tell if he was smiling, or about to run me through with the jagged teeth of his comb.

  “Hand me downs? My dear Lawrence, I hadn’t even gotten to wear that suit before you hauled it off to the tailor’s.”

  “Good. That means no one can suspect another man is wearing your clothes. Now wouldn’t that cause a scandal?” I bent down to tie my laces, ready to be pummeled by every selection of verbal insults, or the possibility of something that carried more force. Keane, being a gentleman, would never dare hit a woman, although I was not certain how far those rules of chivalry came when applied to me. One does not create a seven year friendship with one of the opposite sex and follow all social expectations.

  But he again surpassed all logical expectations when he merely shot a single, sharp ‘Ha!’ and once more leaned over the mirror to smooth the last silver wave of hair into place along his temple. He was a magnificent actor—incredibly so—but I had known him too long to miss that brief smile in the reflective glass.

  To every dawn there is a sun, and to every dusk there is a star.

  It had been planned that we would arrive in separate taxies; Keane first, then myself a little over thirty minutes later. Were two actors, such as it were, to enter upon a stage together; mouths agape with carefully pasted words. His name could not be tied to mine by more than a mutual acquaintance. Our paths were not to cross more than a few times; muddled together until they were of no particular importance. When I at last arrived at the casino, it did not take more than a few glances to find my companion, for I had learned that such places made dynamic masculinity obvious and cowardice the dirt of humanity. Good or bad, moralist or villain, there was a sense of impending danger among all the gamblers.

  They could win or lose everything.

  I didn’t bother laying any bets or catching any cards in fear of winning more money than I already had. It was a shame how much I had collected in my visits, though I suspected it was only pennies in comparison to Keane’s growing treasury. Every now and again I recognised some finely dressed
man or scarcely dressed woman. I recognised them, but rarely knew their names. I didn’t care to know. The only person I had met more than a passing glance was Sam Barker, who had settled himself at one of the card tables near to the bar, but not so awfully close that a visit might gain his attention. As one of the brightly dressed staff mechanically walked passed, I gave him some polite instructions before shoving off toward the bar.

  It is a pleasant thing to allow the world to shift around you without having to lift a finger to make it so. Wheels turned, cards were dealt, and money was frequently passed from hand to hand; lingering only when some fortunate chap struck a thin vein of luck before blundering it all back into the eternal abyss of odds. I ordered something strong enough to dull the pain of life, but not anywhere near the border of intoxication. That done, I moved again toward the only space of the room where there really wasn’t anything more than frustrating conversations to rattle the sanity of life. It was an ocean; thousands of fish swimming up against each other with long strings of incoherent words to tie those loose pieces of fabric into a quilt so gaudy it was repulsive. A quilt of life. A quilt of memories. And all of it beneath an eternal fear.