The Paragon Hotel

by Lyndsay Faye

  “The Beaverton Times and The Hillsboro Argus,” Blossom enunciates with acid annoyance, “are read by pig farmers and dairymen.”

  Jenny’s neck stiffens. “They’ll tell their friends, their friends will tell more friends . . .”

  “It’s a good idea, sugar.” Mavereen crinkles her eyes kindly. “The Lord done give everybody their own set of talents, and He blessed you with a powerful pen. Raise it up and fight with it.”

  “It won’t work.” The whites of Blossom’s eyes gleam pearly pale while the irises glitter like jet.

  “No. But let the girl have her dreams,” Dr. Pendleton concurs.

  “This kind of dream is for innocents and simpletons.”

  Her uncle hoists his thermos. “And never forget, they’re not mutually exclusive.”

  A muscle jumps in Jenny’s smooth cheek.

  “There’s no call for either of you to insult me. If the writing is good enough, bigger papers will pick up the articles, and I plan to make them too good to be ignored.”

  “Just as you like, honey,” Blossom says sweetly. “Make Evelina even more the object of citywide scrutiny than she already is, get called into the offices at some point and then tossed out on your ear, and don’t let’s forget drawing attention to the fact that white people frequent our humble abode, in a clever bid to get it dynamited faster.”

  “This baggage has the right end of the stick for once,” Dr. Pendleton slurs, pushing his comical glasses up his nose.

  “Leave off that thermos or you will greatly consternate me, Doddridge!” Mavereen snaps. “And Blossom, there ain’t no call to be hurtful. Jenny’s pen is sure enough a formidable weapon, but it don’t carry half the firepower of that mouth of yours. ‘A wholesome tongue is the tree of life.’”

  “Oh, isn’t this fine, a Sunday school lesson,” Blossom shoots back. “It’s poking a stick in the hornet’s nest, Jenny. Abort the notion, if you please, I’ve a ghastly headache.”

  “But it will be beneficial—are you so bitter at me for whatever reason you’ve conjured up this time that you can’t see how?” Jenny cries. “It shows that we value ourselves! It shows that we toil at becoming the finest of citizens. It shows us for what we are—good people who want to work with whites, not keep colored company exclusively.”

  Blossom slams her hands down on the table. Everyone gapes. She’s a force of nature, but I’ve never seen her like this, the tendons of her elegant neck rope-tight and the jut of her brow as hostile as the prow of a warship.

  “You think that decorum and virtue will make a difference to them. And I am here to tell you, honey, that it will not,” Blossom states. “You can use the proper cutlery for the length of an entire eight-course dinner. You can wear your modest Sunday best daily, with a five-dollar hat and a pocket Bible in your handbag. You can abstain from liquor and convince dozens of the unwashed poor to sign the temperance pledge. You can cultivate tea roses. You can pawn all your earthly luxuries and spend the money to build an orphanage. You can vote Democrat. You can bow and scrape and mind your place and speak when spoken to and smile when you’re slapped. You’re still a nigger to them.”

  Even knowing Blossom’s temper as they do, her friends all stare in horror.

  “Do you begin to understand what I’m telling you?” she seethes. “The way you act doesn’t matter. The way you smell, dress, talk—none of it matters. You can write articles until your hand falls off, but you’re still a nigger, you’re a red nigger, and there is nothing to stop the likes of Officer Overton from shooting you in the back and claiming your spine admired to do him mischief. So go on, if you like—try to change the world. I’ll be right here cheering for you, honey, trust that I will. I’d stand in front of a loaded rifle if it were pointed at you, but don’t ask me to stick my neck out over a cause when I’m terribly preoccupied with keeping us alive.”

  Fat tears drop from Jenny’s thick lashes. “How can you sit there and say such horrid things?”

  “Do you want me to sit here saying horrid things, or do you want horrid things to happen? Do you even know how many horrid things are already—”

  “Blossom, shut your trap,” Dr. Pendleton growls.

  I expect a tirade of Olympic proportions in response to this rebuke. But Blossom simply raises herself to her full height, nods formally to her uncle, and sweeps out of the room.

  Cancer, I think helplessly. Cancer is happening, and none of us can change that.

  Mavereen puts warm arms around a shaking Jenny. Dr. Pendleton tips the thermos fully back and shuffles out of the room. I need to know whether Blossom is all right, so I hurry after him into the lobby. A trio of traveling sales types sign paperwork for Rooster, and a family wearing feather-capped finery stand laughing with hands draped elegantly over their bellies. A silent maid floats past. Blossom is at the elevator summoning Wednesday Joe.

  When I arrive at her side, I see that she’s already weeping silently and battle a frantic urge to take her hand.

  “You needn’t bother,” she husks. “I’m a monster.”

  “You’re not a monster.” My tongue aches with the weight of the word.

  The elevator door slides open, and Wednesday Joe’s face screws into alarm.

  “Jeez, Miss Fontaine, are you—”

  “In a hurry,” she says as we enter. “Carry us to the fifth floor before one of my admirers catches me sniveling, it’s terribly poor policy for entertainers. Go on, honey, step on it. I’ll be right as Portland rain by tomorrow.”

  We reach the top floor in record time. She exits, back as straight as one of the local pines, and I pursue. If she wants me, she can have me. If she doesn’t, I’ll learn about it in no uncertain terms.

  She stops before my own door without turning around.

  “Alice, if you don’t object, and please object if you like, I’m not fit company for a Tartar, but I can’t face Jenny either, and if she comes looking . . .”

  “No, of course, it’s fine.”

  Unlocking my door, I watch as she sits on the bed and unbuckles patent-leather shoes. I kick my flats off and join her. When she’s finished, to my short-lived amazement, she curls up like a cat with her head in my lap, breath coming in painful hitches. So I cover her long neck with my hand.

  “Merely an experiment. Be not alarmed,” she whispers.

  “What’s the verdict?”

  “You’re a comfort.”

  Not that I’d imagined she was pulling the sapphic stuff, but this is a relief, as I’ve no wish to navigate that particular river. “Quelque luck. I enjoy being of use ever so much.”

  “I know you do, honey. It’s frightfully endearing.”

  “Do you want to tell me what in Christ’s name that was all about?”

  “Not in the slightest degree, but you’re the one stuck here with your lap occupied, so consider any other topic fair game.”

  Pressing a thumb into her spine, I answer, “How was your friend Mrs. Vaughan?”

  This brings a fresh gust of precipitation. “Not well. Tom has her confined to barracks, which is both . . . good and absolutely ghastly, depending on perspective. She doesn’t do well confined.”

  “When did the two of you meet? I was wondering, when I was having tea with Muriel Snider. They’re acquainted.”

  “When I first moved here, about six months before she became engaged to Tom. Davy was freshly ensconced, the precious boy, and she turned up at our doorstep to suggest the altogether lunatic notion of teaching self-improvement lessons to colored children, wanting to use the hotel, and I was strong for her from the start. She’s brilliant. And good, which I’ll never be.”

  She doesn’t know that I’m aware of her proclivities. But I’m curious whether Blossom’s justifiable regard for Mrs. Vaughan has spilled from hail-fellow-well-met into doodling fanciful initials in locked diaries.

  “Yo
u can be good, I have confidence,” I joke. “We’ll start you up petting stray puppies and you’ll be spoon-feeding lepers in two shakes.”

  “Senseless optimism, honey. My soul is hideous. Dorian Gray would regard it with skepticism.”

  “That horse you’re beating needs burying.”

  “Touché.”

  “Is Mrs. Vaughan at least resting more comfortably?”

  “She was before I arrived, but as is very typical for me, I think I put my foot in it.” Rolling to her back, Blossom looks up at me with swimming eyes. “Evy doesn’t like seeing me so ill. Neither do I, of course. I’m heinously vain, Alice. Dr. Pendleton and I are working miracles, I promised her we were, it’s merely . . . taking a bit longer than I’d like.”

  Cancer, I reflect, doesn’t generally take much time at all.

  “Of course, to him, whether I live or die is purely a matter of academics—if he didn’t possess an unshakable belief in the universality of his Hippocratic obligations, he wouldn’t lift a finger for me.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Because he detests me.”

  “I can’t imagine detesting you.”

  “I’d say that I can imagine it all too well,” she replies with a broken smile. “But I don’t have to imagine. No one is as skilled at detesting me as I am.”

  She curls back up, weeping freely now, and I think again with a hemorrhaging heart how much she reminds me of Rye. Beautiful china vases filled to brimming with talent and empathy and humor. Smashing themselves to smithereens at every opportunity.

  ◆ Eighteen ◆

  THEN

  When a man is marked for death his assassins learn the street which he passes through most frequently on his way home at night. Then an apartment or a stable with the window facing this street is selected. . . . There is a squeeze on the trigger, the roar of the explosion to which Harlem’s “Little Italy” is becoming accustomed, and by the time the police enter the building from which the shot was fired there is nothing but a few empty bottles, a table and a chair, and the smell of stale tobacco smoke.

  —THE NEW YORK HERALD January 7, 1917

  When I awoke the morning the Tobacco Club was to open, I rubbed at the desert behind my eyelids and reached a sorry conclusion.

  Still drunk.

  I slithered out of bed.

  Unfairly, I was angry. At Zachariah for not caring when I told him how much we all cared. For soaking up my notice when I had so achingly wanted him to notice me. Now I know that I wasn’t angry at him; I was furious over my total incapacity to do something about it, about whiskey and heroin syrup in particular.

  Fresh air was required, to scrub the senses and polish the psyche. So I washed, dressed, and made for the sky. The familiar creak of the rooftop door settled me, as did the velveteen trilling of birds, and the August air for once was as dry and clean as a freshly ironed blouse.

  Mr. Salvatici was hard at his monthly cleaning of the dovecote. I didn’t feel strong for conversation. But when he spied me, my boss stopped shoveling cedar shavings to deliver a friendly wave.

  “Well, as I live and breathe,” he greeted me.

  “Sounds a lofty goal.”

  “My dear young lady, you appear fatigued.” A twinkle lurked in his deep-set eyes.

  “You witness before you an embodied hangover.”

  “Zachariah Lane was being his unusual self last night, I suppose?”

  Mr. Salvatici had rolled in the hay with my own mother and was meticulously gracious around me, so since my original example of male authority had been Mr. Mangiapane, I was strangely open with him about matters conjugal. Rye and I hadn’t had any, but that wasn’t my fault, was it?

  “He’s wonderful, isn’t he? But . . . I don’t think he has a cough anymore.”

  Mr. Salvatici rubbed his nose with his wrist. “No, but he’s a loyal employee and a brilliant performer.”

  “Plenty of the other nightclubs offer heroin syrup along with cocktails,” it occurred to me. “Will the Tobacco Club?”

  “I’d never dream of it.” Mr. Salvatici dropped more fouled bedding in his barrow. “We are nation builders, and drugs make otherwise thriving populations dependent and miserable. Look no further than the history of the Opium Wars.”

  I wasn’t versed in this topic despite years of lessons in what’s probably termed common knowledge. But I tended to take my guardian at his word. “Does that mean you don’t think much of Rye?”

  “He serves a purpose still. Just as everyone must, or they become dispensable.”

  Remembering my own reconnaissance, I asked, “Did you send Nicolo to take care of Sammy the Saint last night?”

  “Oh, no. It’ll all take place tonight, at the grand opening. Just as they plan. Well. Not just as they plan, eh?”

  I assumed he was kidding me. But the clouds scudded by overhead, and the pigeons winked with beady glass eyes, and eventually an icy nail driving into my neck decided that it must be true.

  “That’s—it’s mad. Isn’t it? I’m sorry. But for God’s sake, why?”

  Mr. Salvatici propped the shovel against the barrow and dusted his hands on his work trousers. Reaching into the dovecote, he gently pulled out a fog-colored bird with charcoal stripes on its wings and began to check it over. His thin dash of a mouth drooped at one edge.

  “It might appear mad,” he admitted, “but since you were lucky and clever enough to provide us with advance warning, we have a far more lucrative opportunity. I’ll put my best guards in place inside the club, naturally, and young Mr. Benenati’s men will take up sniper positions. When the hit squad rolls to a stop, we’ll be ready for them.”

  “Why not just do away with them quietly, so there’s less risk?”

  “Because life is a circus. When you risk nothing or little, your audience is entitled to think little or nothing of your efforts, Nobody.” Returning the bird to its cage with a fond caress, he chose another, a dear nut-brown creature. “When you risk a great deal, people take notice. Think of your friend Mr. Benenati, for example. If his father had simply vanished, I can’t imagine the son and heir would have stood up against the Family. Nor that Harlem would have protested the way it did. But mutilating the owner of a popular local cigar shop? It was dangerous. It garnered a great deal of attention.”

  “And that’s what we want?” I asked faintly.

  “We want public awareness that we are capable of solving problems like the one Bruno’s Café faced. Think of it like an advertisement.”

  “Won’t people get hurt? I mean, obviously, but. People who’ve nothing to do with us?”

  “I’ll do everything I can to prevent it, but this is Harlem. Everyone has something to do with either us or them. We offer an alternative—the organization that builds instead of decimates, feeds instead of drains. People will do practically anything for you, just so long as they believe they’re on the right side. And if your Nicolo Benenati is as good as they say he is, I hope only the would-be assassins will come to any harm.” He cocked his wolfish head, studying me. “You’ll stay here, of course, my dear young lady.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, dazed. “I wanted to be at the opening, but.”

  “I hate to lose my good luck charm however briefly. But I don’t blame you for feeling ill at ease, so I’d prefer you stay safe and snug. The opening will be interrupted anyhow, and you know how notoriety works in this neighborhood. We’ll be on the front page of every newspaper and doubly packed the next night, and you’ll join me for a steak supper, and we’ll celebrate our most public victory to date.”

  “The police won’t be a problem?”

  “Of course not. We’ll have Harry arrest a few of us, go before the judge with half a dozen witnesses saying we were elsewhere, as usual. Nothing will come of it. The true law of these streets is us, after all.”

  A muted pop sounded,
a noise like the sweet push of a cork from a champagne bottle. When I recognized it was the pretty fawn bird’s neck snapping, my heart started pounding in thick thuds against my ribs.

  “Avian goiter.” Mr. Salvatici sighed. He tossed the small body into the pile of shavings in the barrow. “Fatal, and terribly painful. Pity. She was an excellent flyer. I do so hate to see potential wasted, don’t you?”

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t stop shaking until I arrived back in my room. One might think me awfully dense, and I agree. Of course Mr. Salvatici was a killer—the first night I spoke with him, he’d just knifed two Corleonesi. And of course he lost no sleep dispatching the targets I helped identify. And of course he occasionally had to put down a bird.

  Pondering this while hearing the gentle snap of the pigeon’s spine, however, made my teeth quake.

  Mauro Salvatici was a deadly man. And a good guardian. I’d lived with those two truths for years. He trusted me and treated me well, and so it was easy as shelling a peanut to trust him in turn. Now I wondered, seeing as he aimed to make an example of Sammy the Saint in full view of the Tobacco Club, what else he wasn’t telling me.

  He’d be on the roof for another hour. And he often failed to latch his side of the door. So did I, now we’d lived together for so long.

  Church-mouse quiet, even though there was no real need for stealth, I tried the handle.

  The door swung open immediately.

  Hackles prickling, I sped toward his writing desk—I’d often watched him make journal entries as we sat together over frittata and coffee. The current one rested in plain view.

  It took me mere minutes to scan the past two months. The panic drained like a fever ebbing. He was dreadfully annoyed at the Clutch Hand’s ability to execute orders from Sing Sing. The construction of the Tobacco Club had run over budget, but he expected to make all back within three months. The political push for Prohibition he found ever so encouraging, because every renegade on the island smelled the same opportunity. He had tremendous confidence in Nicolo Benenati’s capacity to murder people.