by Lyndsay Faye
The frown on Nicolo’s face turned thunderous. He didn’t bother with lights, and I nearly tripped in his wake as he clattered up the shabby stairs to their apartment. When we plunged inside, he turned up one small lamp, its glow sickly in the stifling dim. I stood on the braided carpet with blood pounding in my ears.
“Where—”
“Mom and Dad are at Enrico’s. His pork chop is back on the menu this week.”
“Then what the hell are we doing?” I demanded shrilly. “You all have to run for it!”
“No. We don’t.”
A shadow shaped like my friend Nicolo turned away from the bookshelf. Only this wasn’t Nicolo. It was a seventeen-year-old man with muscled arms, eyes glowing like the cherry at the end of one of his father’s cigars.
The silhouette had a gun in its hand.
“No,” I gasped. “Nicolo—”
“The Clutch Hand can suck my cock.”
I crossed myself. “Please don’t say his name. And that isn’t how this works.”
“It is now.” Nicolo pushed the window curtain a few inches aside. I heard him inhale.
“What?”
“There’s something moving. Down in the rear yard. Is it them, you figure?”
“Probably, they just left. Don’t confront a pair of Corleonesi. Please. It’ll be a closed-casket ceremony and I don’t even have a black veil.” My stomach had relocated to my shoes.
My friend approached me, thin and taut as a riding crop. The gun gleamed as he slowly lifted it to his lips, kissing the barrel with strange reverence. Finger resting gently on the trigger, he then pressed the side of the weapon over my heart.
“They frightened you,” he whispered. “And they’re attacking my home, my business. This is all mine. The Corleonesi can rot in hell.”
I chased him out of the parlor and down the stairs. Surely Nicolo meant to open the till and pay the men off, holding the gun only as a precaution. Surely he would run down the street to 102nd and the police station house with its green beacon blazing and get help.
Not that they could help. But surely, he knew he was no match for the Family.
Surely.
“Head to the café at the end of the block and wait,” Nicolo ordered as we burst outside into smoke-thick dusk. “I’m going around through the alley. Safer than being pinned in the doorway at the back of the shop. I’ll have the advantage.”
“Don’t do this,” I begged.
You’ve always listened to me. You love me, I think, though I’m not sure what that looks like.
“Get two orders of the bruschetta for us and don’t eat it all.”
“Nicolo—”
“Trust me, topolina.”
He dashed away.
Of course I trusted him. And of course, I followed after anyhow. He didn’t see me as I floated behind, a drab afterthought of a person. When he entered the alley between the town houses, I hung back. Ears straining for a gunshot, a curse, a masculine cry of pain. My breath was sulfurous in my lungs, which I chalked up to terror before I realized it was a real smell.
Crude oil and chemical bite and shoe leather.
I had to stop him. I was nearly to Nicolo’s gate, which he’d left swinging, when a hand closed around my mouth.
I thrashed like a seizure victim. Then the edge of a knife rose before my eyes, and I went numb.
It was already crusted with blood.
“Your friend is about to make a curious discovery,” said an even baritone. “It will doubtless startle him, but he isn’t my concern. You are my concern, Miss Alice James. Now, walk in front of me, in that lovely unnoticeable way you have, into Central Park.”
Too terrified to protest, and too perplexed to ask questions, puppet Nobody simply complied. The brief journey west to the Park was nightmarish, and not just thanks to my circumstances. A haze of guttering lanterns lit my path, decorative paper-mache skulls swinging from the brownstones’ gaslights, punctuated by the violent blasts of early holiday firecrackers and revelers cackling like devils.
That lovely unnoticeable way you have.
Had this killer—for a killer he surely was—been watching me?
We entered the Park at 106th Street. After sunfall, the northernmost acres were dusk etched over gloom, though before us I could see, beyond the weeping trees, the hill where old rebel army fortifications decayed. Rotting for lack of redcoats. I’d frolicked there with Nicolo before malavita, searching for Revolutionary bullets. Now any second I could be joining the soldiers’ ghosts.
The knife met my spine, and my throat seized.
“This bench will do nicely, Miss James. Please sit down.”
Obedience was my only option. But when I turned to view my captor, my mouth fell open. Here was the sedate regular with the newspaper. The one who liked my mother, the one whose penciled-in mouth was edging up in an unreadable smile.
“What do you want?” I managed through a wire-thin throat.
“Oh, nearly everything.” His voice was smooth as an untouched pool, with the distant specter of an accent. “But nothing I think you’d be unwilling to give.”
Run, said the rustling of the trees.
Run where?
“My name is Mauro Salvatici.” His knife rested concealed behind his angled thigh. “I’m an acquaintance of your mother’s, as you surely know. A fine woman, charming. But I confess I often return to observe you rather than to dally with her.”
“Observe me?”
“Why, yes. You, Miss James, have mastered the art of hiding in plain sight. No easy trick. You float from table to table like a moth, and when I’ve followed you—yes, and I do beg your pardon—you accomplish the same in the busy streets. If sufficiently roused, however, you burst into violent action. You have deeply impressed me.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the man who wants to stand up to the Corleonesi.”
Speechless, I gawked at him. His high brow and his liquid eyes and his mouth like a scar.
“There’s no standing up to the Corleonesi. They piss in your face and slaughter your kin.”
“Nevertheless, you just did stand up to the Corleonesi. As did I. Nicolo Benenati has by now discovered two warm corpses behind his house.”
I’d no response to this, sick with fear as I was. He might as well have already cut out my tongue. For all the good it was doing.
“You imagine me dangerous. Good—I am dangerous. But I am also, you will find, sane. Which compliment cannot be paid to the Clutch Hand. Now. Why do you suppose he sent assassins to your friend’s door?”
A shudder rocked me. Embarrassed, I clasped interlaced fingers between my knees.
“Mr. Benenati didn’t pay his protection money,” I answered. “Old Benenati’s a good man, and people like him. So . . . it would be an example. To hurt him.”
“Very good, my dear young lady.”
“Nicolo will inherit that shop.” I shook my head, eyes tearing. “They wanted to destroy it. Destroying things is all the bastards ever do.”
Mr. Salvatici pulled out a white kerchief, casually wiping his blade. “Yes, but that did not in fact happen, and here is what will happen next. Doubtless your friend will drag them into the rear alley and attempt to remove the blood from his own backyard. Police will discover that the dead men are Family—they will then shrug and walk away like always. My gang is large and well-connected downtown. No, don’t fret, I promise you that we mean you no personal harm. I require a willing ally for this task, not an indentured servant.”
“Task?”
“Miss James, I own a hotel, the Arcadia. It’s just there.” My eye followed his long index finger to glowing lights. “On a Hundred and Tenth and Fifth Avenue. Nothing like your Raines law monstrosity. A real hotel, with amenities. I propose that you live there as my ward. Your room, your board, your training, your
comforts—I’ll see to everything.”
I found this proposal astonishing. Just not astonishing enough, as it turned out.
“But why?”
“Because what I need are eyes and ears in Harlem. Here, I am alien, in a way I’m not in Hell’s Kitchen. And you detest the Family.”
“Everyone does.”
He lifted a shoulder, folding his gore-smeared handkerchief. “Granted. But prolonged tyranny dulls the wits and weakens the blood of the citizens under it. They grow lazy. Inured to suffering and thus greedy of the smallest favors. Tyranny is water over a sandbank, wearing all resistance away. You are a rebel—despite your outward timidity. There are two types of rulers, Miss James: commanders and parasites. The Corleonesi feed off of the likes of you. I’m likewise a criminal, Miss James, I put it to you frankly, but I dislike monopolies. They’re stifling. And I dislike parasites still more.”
“I don’t understand. I only know you just murdered two Mafia fire starters.”
He laughed softly, thin mouth stretching. “Indeed—I solved a problem you could not. An efficient means of proving I want you by my side.”
Questions picked at my skull like buzzards. Nevertheless, ten minutes ago, I had one option as regards career.
Now I had two, and Nicolo was alive.
“But why me?” I insisted.
“People take no more notice of you than the breeze. You speak Italian and Sicilian. You’re young enough for me to train as I please. In fact, you are brimming with untapped potential, so much that it’s already spilling onto the ground, and I detest seeing potential wasted. It infuriates me. You’re desperate for a way out, and I can give it to you. That will inspire loyalty. And I’ll prove loyal in return.”
I ought to have realized that this explanation held about a thimbleful of water.
Ain’t hindsight a peach?
“And if I say no?” I questioned, every limb tingling.
“You won’t.” Mr. Salvatici rose. “I’ll give you a week to consider, however, and if you do say no, nothing will happen. But I won’t be there to protect you five years from now. Ten years from now. Twenty. Good night, my dear young lady, and give my best to your mother.”
He walked away. Left me with the squirrels and the willows and the lonesome frogs, trying to glue my world back together.
When I think of my father, the love-addled romantic who called Catrin James bella, bella, bella, I know he was a man of strong ambition. Mum took life as it came. Like a particularly intelligent sheep. But Dad, oh, Dad must have been a regular roarer. It must mean something that, while my skin is milky and my hair honey hued, my eyes are so dark as to nearly be black. They must be his eyes. Because that night, I could see my future if I chose to remain at the Step Right Inn. Ten percent of this sack of organs would be of value to anyone.
The rest? So much garbage. The older, the rottener.
◆ Seven ◆
NOW
As soon as one nigger is allowed to stay in these parts, this community ceases to be a white man’s country, and in as much as it doesn’t take very long for a family of niggers to increase into a “buck town” of large population, the coming of one nigger is the beginning of future trouble.
—WILLIAM H. GREEN, “Let’s Keep Grant’s Pass a White Man’s Town,” Southern Oregon Spokesman, Grant’s Pass, Oregon, May 24, 1924
By Thursday, the day before Max returns to life at sixty miles per hour, I’m recovered enough to tour the Paragon Hotel.
This ought to elicit sturdy cheers. But tension hereabouts crackles like late-March ice over a pond. When Davy barrel-rolls—the boy’s unstoppably curious—into my sanctuary to find me scouring the New York newspapers for familiar names, it’s to deliver wild tales of monsters in the sewers and snakes in the vegetable patch, and to ask why I’m still here. As if I’m a countdown to an awfully grim foray into No Man’s Land.
“It’s ’cause of the ghosts who are after us,” he tells me gravely. “The ones haunting the woods. Miss Christina says they’ll sure get us good if you stay on much longer.”
“Miss Christina ought to eat more cookies,” I inform him, puzzled.
But it lacks all conviction.
Mavereen drops by once daily, gracious and stern, gladdened my color is now offending pinkish rather than offending death-white. Frowning whenever I compliment the fineness of the china, the softness of the linens, the marvelous flatness of the walls. By now I’ve paid her in full, same as Dr. Pendleton, which only amplifies their enthusiasm over becoming less acquainted.
As for my new friend, we sit on her bed gabbing like sisters, poring over fashion rags and listening to opera and jazz records. Blossom doesn’t seem to give a Bronx cheer in a moratorium that I’m a hoodlum. But while she bestows easy smiles and peat-smoke whiskey, she refuses to discuss the film of worry clouding her eyes.
“When you’re well again, honey,” she soothes. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. I did from day one—I’m a sap, remember?”
But her attention wanders to empty corners and her buffed nails drift between her teeth. And I can no more force a confidence than I can repeal Prohibition.
Mornings are endless, a sea of broken clocks. Everyone I love is lost to me. I haven’t a clue whether half of them are dead or alive and it’s maddening, not knowing if their names are being called from across a crowded nightclub or etched in unrelenting stone.
Max stays away, and I force myself not to notice.
The knock at the door still sends a pulse through me, but I recover when my eyes flick to the clock. Four thirty on a lush, wet afternoon. My escort is punctual to the minute.
“Do come in!”
Blossom steps through, wearing a voile handkerchief tunic frock ending in four dramatic points, the pattern on the georgette overblouse done in cobalt and dull gold. The woman is a veritable ode to triangles. She laughs at my own costume, fanning her fingertips over her cheek.
“Honey, what in the name of Sam Hill can you possibly be wearing?”
“Perfect, isn’t it?” I demonstrate my newly recovered ability to pivot without plummeting like a Sopwith Camel. “Mrs. Meader is apt to stick a bulb in my mug and a lampshade on my head to help me blend in downstairs otherwise. This’ll prove how smashing I am at disappearance.”
“Yes, I need to talk with you about Mavereen.” Blossom makes a dainty fish face. “Christ almighty, you’re a beauty of a bluestocking.”
“I told you—I’m not always tearing around blocking lead pellets.”
“Naturally, such a life would be exhausting. But I never pictured the transformation would be quite this complete.”
The Nobody I am to explore the hotel wears a slipover crêpe de chine blouse in a grey like our mornings, with a black wool skirt. The accessories are the corker: a businesslike silver head scarf erases every wisp of blond, powder dulls my lips, and I’ve both a notebook and an unapologetically spinsterish pair of reading glasses. Studied classics but likes the library’s solitude better than its stories, reluctant suffragette disgusted by actual politics, idolizes Nellie Bly. Believes in cold baths and strong coffee. Never quite grew into her elbows. That sort.
“What about Mavereen?” I don a Votes for Women pin, the final touch. “Anyone lamps me, I’ll take a shorthand note and say I’m writing about the most dreadfully curious hotel on the West Coast.”
“Ah, yes, Mavereen. Mavereen is something of the—how shall I put this?—the goddess supreme.”
“I gathered. Her decrees absolute and her nail clippings holy relics?”
“Precisely. And there’s to be a meeting tonight. The established residents make up a board of directors of sorts, terribly official, the endless discussions, are we doing enough? What about doing something else altogether? Or not doing a thing in the world? Riveting. Your name has arisen, you see. Often.”
My hackles tingle.
“Give me the straight stuff.”
Blossom twitches a regretful shrug. “You didn’t think that paying the rent would change your spots to stripes, did you? Oh, don’t look like that, honey. I’m on the side of the misfits. If they vote to torpedo you, I’ll give them what for. But I don’t have a flawless success rate.”
“You told them, didn’t you?” I question, hurt. “About the money. You supposed I was hot to quit New York and swiped it.”
Blossom raises slender hands in protest. “Perish the thought.”
“It’s entirely mine, and I never got it by loafing either.”
“Alice, I know, and I also know what sort of take a girl can swing these days considering the state of national aridity. But this has nothing to do with filthy lucre. Maybe . . . maybe you can stay a few weeks, get your sea legs under you, and find a place that better suits.”
This place suits.
The truth is, I’ve been shoving thoughts underwater like unwanted puppies. When your world is emptied, you cling to strangers, clutch straws so as not to fall off entirely. I feel beholden to them, but they owe me nothing. I want to help them, but they haven’t asked me to.
They remind me of home, but that isn’t their fault.
“Display for me the wonders of the Paragon,” I announce with an effort. “Maybe I’ll write a real story instead of a pretend one.”
“Now, there’s the spirit.” Blossom takes my arm. “We’ll work it out, won’t we? The two of us. You’ll be set up happy as a clam at high tide.”
I realize, fighting tears, that Blossom is not nearly as fine an actress as I supposed her to be. Or maybe the subject of belonging nowhere is near enough to her heart that acting doesn’t enter the picture.
* * *
—
We make a goodly number of stops before the afternoon unravels like a sweater knit by a maiden auntie.
The elevator is a swank one, its pretty floral brass frozen in weatherproof bloom. Blossom squeezes my elbow like an overgrown schoolgirl when it arrives at the fifth floor.
“You’re about to be subjected to the most delicious nonsense,” she confides.
