The Paragon Hotel

by Lyndsay Faye

  “So you tried out the gumshoe act in my dressing room too? Because I certainly don’t want to feel left out.”

  “I didn’t dream of it.” I finish wiping her brow. “Scout’s honor. Better yet, honor among thieves. I spilled a few drops of the good stuff on your counter and didn’t want to wipe it up with French silk. I needed a cloth. So.”

  “So,” she repeats, her eyes lost someplace I’ve never visited.

  I tackle the streaks from her split lip. Her face is nearly clean, and that makes me feel immeasurably lighter, for all that she’s still battered to hamburger.

  “You found the dietary pamphlet,” she supposes.

  “Yes, and never breathed a word of it to a living.”

  She gives a meaningful cough. “That cleverly vague excuse you gave Mavereen regarding the torturous, embarrassing, excruciating, altogether soul-crushing modern treatment for my sort?”

  “Oh, Blossom!” I drop the cloth, kiss the top of her head, the tip of her nose, the undamaged eyelash. “I didn’t know. Christ, I could kick myself from here to Canada except that it worked.”

  “It even had the virtue of being true.”

  Lips at her hairline, I say, “There’s nothing virtuous about it. Please tell me the rest of it’s true too—that you’re going to be climbing Mount Rainier ten years from now.”

  “Probably not.”

  She taps at my knee and I swiftly meet her gaze.

  “I couldn’t tell that you knew. I . . . hadn’t realized it could be like that. Thank you.”

  Lifting one shoulder, I think of every-colored eyes and muscles wasting to nothing more than paint for their bones. “It’s not my first rodeo with serious conditions. You remind me of him, actually.”

  “Really?” Her nose wrinkles. “Then was he the most sophisticated and cultured gent in all New York?”

  “Of course he was.”

  “Naturally. Did you adore him?”

  “To mortification.”

  “Oh, honey. Did he meet a tragic and glorious hero’s demise?”

  “Haven’t the faintest. He may still be alive, actually. If he is, it won’t be for long.”

  She tucks the uninjured part of her lip between her teeth.

  “Don’t be sorry,” I interject, although I still am. Every day. “He will doubtless perish as he lived, beloved of all the world save one. The mirror played wretched tricks with the fellow, if you understand me.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “There. Voilà. Now that you are ravishing again, I suggest that I help you to your dressing screen and I pour us two very immodest drinks. What say you?”

  “I say I’m throwing you a parade.”

  I leave her gripping her wall of painted herons. Then I wrap a generous scoopful of the ice in a dry towel, pour libations, and steel myself for what unfortunately must—supposing I can manage it before Dr. Pendleton returns—be accomplished now.

  Bite the bullet and pull the trigger, old girl.

  When my friend emerges in a floral red, gold, and sapphire kimono-style robe, my resolve goes the way of the punctured balloon. Because she looks improved, even smiles faintly. We ensconce ourselves quite cozily on the bed again. Blossom on her side facing me, accepting the ice and applying it to her brow. I sitting up with my knees tucked, casting about for a way to do this gently.

  “Should I ask Miss Christina to bring you some chow?”

  She adjusts a pillow. “I can’t countenance any other humans presently.”

  “In that case. Not to appear to wish to, um, change the subject, but . . .”

  “Anything!” she cries, almost laughing. “Christ on a tricycle, anything else, I am literally dying and had simply the dreadfullest morning, may we speak of taxation reform?”

  “How perfectly ghastly. No.” I smirk into my grog. “How should I best put this?”

  “Oh my God,” Blossom breathes. “You didn’t? You did.”

  “Yes, well, you see last night—never mind last night as a general concept, when taken by averages we should chuck it right out, there’s much to tell you, but last night, I did manage to seduce a certain second lieutenant.”

  I grin at her. It’s shockingly easy. I care for her that much, you see.

  Blossom’s dark eye glows as wickedly as her cat’s.

  “Tell me everything there is to know about Maximilian in the sack, sparing no detail. Commence.”

  I do—well, I do in sketch form. I answer yes, and oh God, yes, and actually, and Blossom tries not to cackle, and fails.

  “And so you see before you,” I conclude with some pathos, “a woman in the thrall of a man possessing a set of twins, two medals of valor, and a work address that changes time zones.”

  Blossom clucks, but her eyes are dancing.

  “What?”

  “You had him, though,” she drawls in finest Blossom style, “and it was luxurious.”

  “Ugh,” I moan, remembering. “It was the veriest.”

  Setting aside the ice, she plays with my fingers. “I’m so glad. Two of my favorite lost pennies together. Gorgeous.”

  Capturing her hand, I let it be known I intend to keep it, to which she makes no objection.

  “I haven’t informed you yet where we indulged in this tête-à-tête.”

  She blinks. “Do tell.”

  “It was Maximilian’s cabin.”

  Of course she knows the instant I say the words. The spark in her gaze turns from sunlight to steel.

  “There was convincing evidence Davy had been there.”

  She tries, bless her, to look surprised. But all she can do is heave a single devastated sob into the pillow.

  I curl toward her. “Shh, it’s me. We’ll work it out between us. Tell me every little thing and I’ll fix it with you. Oh, here, I’ve a jazzy notion, I’ll tell you the bits I already know and save you the trouble.”

  I yarn her fairy tales about a chef and a doorman who wish for a farm more than anything, and so unlock a door they had no business touching. About a glittering city by a great bay, and a wild creature who went to live there, and a beautiful woman who never thereafter could sing French love songs, they hurt her so. About a foundling who may never have been lost, and a sinister force threatening a once happy kingdom—or anyhow, as happy as it could be.

  Blossom shakes, face half hidden. But she doesn’t contradict me.

  “Then I found the ransom note,” I conclude. “Blossom, this must be nightmarish, but I have to know where he’s been taken and who’s been persecuting Mrs. Vaughan.”

  Her head rises. “Ransom note?”

  “Blossom, I’ve seen you with Evelina, you’d throw yourself on a spit for her and baste yourself with butter. The only reason you could possibly be involved—the key, the cabin—is because you love her, and I know that he’s her son. The note said repeated installments. If someone is blackmailing her, or otherwise threatening her—who would do such a horrid thing as frighten a mother by way of her child? And in such a hideous way that you would ever dream of agreeing? The boy’s father, maybe?”

  Blossom produces a ghastly laugh.

  “The boy’s father?” she repeats.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m his father.”

  Have you ever looked at a picture in a penny arcade in high summer, with salt in your hair and sand on your toes, and been asked, is this an evil witch or a beautiful princess? Is this a face, or is it a vase of flowers? And you’re in a tearing great rush to get it right, because you think there’s only one answer. So you choose the first one you see, and you’re so strong for it that you can’t see the other. But it’s there the whole time. And if you squint the peepers, hey presto, the whole image changes, and you wonder why you couldn’t see it before.

  “Oh my God,” I breathe. “Of course you are.”


  It’s a dumb response—I’ll not haggle over that. It rouses the Blossom I know and love though, which is awfully fine.

  “Of course I am?” she snaps.

  Then she—my brain can’t think of her any other way, the same as if you see the princess first, it’s so taxing to find the witch—forces herself to a sitting position.

  “Whoa there!” I exclaim.

  “Of course I am,” she repeats. “I tell you this secret, this simply monstrous secret, Alice James, the one that has ruined my life, the one I’ve never voluntarily told a human soul other than a lover, and you don’t have the decency to be surprised?”

  “Well, when you put it that way.”

  Blossom throws her head back and this laugh—the one I gladly join in—is a pure middle finger in the face of the universe. Then she collapses onto the bedclothes and it turns sharp and irregular. She covers her spectacularly bruised face with her hands.

  “Oh God, what have I done?”

  “Hey—”

  “Decades!” she snarls at the ceiling. “I have been perfect, I have been immaculate, and now it’s not enough I’m dying, oh no, I also have to be neck-deep in shit. Only Evy and dear old Uncle Doddridge hereabouts could have spoken a word against me.”

  “What about Jenny?”

  “Oh, I’d never tell her, we only—”

  She clamps her jaw tight with a snap. It would be amusing, if this were the time to be amused.

  “What are you?” she cries. “Must you know everything?”

  “Nobody special.”

  “Oh, no, nobody special, you’re just the one who made me crack finally, who utterly decimated my perfect record of devotion to my one simple rule, which is never tell anyone.”

  “I think . . . I’ve seen people crack before, in several sorts of ways. But I don’t think that’s what this was. Cracking. By all means blow the penalty whistle if I’m out of bounds, but I think this was spilling?”

  “Spilling,” she repeats incredulously. “And why would I do that?”

  “Two reasons. In the first place, because you said that you thought if I knew you, really knew you, that I wouldn’t hate you.”

  The bristling is replaced by fear. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  She considers this, finds it truth. “That’s . . . astonishing. And good.”

  “Yes, rather.”

  “What’s the second reason?”

  This time I fold her hand in both of mine. “You spilled so you wouldn’t crack.”

  Tears swim, but don’t overflow.

  “Blossom, will you please tell me where Davy is? Everyone’s going bananas, and they can have the boat, hell they can have the whole jungle, but you don’t want to do this to Max and Mavereen and Miss Christina, do you?”

  “Not to any of them. But they’re going to have to remain in ignorance.”

  “Blossom, for Christ’s sake, where is your son?”

  “At a boarding school for promising Negro youth in Chicago.”

  She barely has the final syllable out before she’s weeping so hard she can’t breathe, and I manage to snatch her up, and even before she has the chance to do halfway decent work soaking my frock, the words pour forth.

  “We had to, we had to,” she gasps. “I can hardly bear it, Alice, I want to jump off the roof, save only for Evy. We had to. This city. We thought it would be different, when we decided to be near family. Being used to San Francisco, we thought—we were so wrong. But we’re as trapped here as if there were actual chains on our legs. Evy’s family. My uncle. The husband she married so she’d be able to live near me and Davy—though I like Tom, very much. He loves her the way I do, and she loves him so sweetly. But I’m dying, Alice, and Evy’s mind is . . .”

  This isn’t crying, this is heartbreak like a fault line splitting.

  “What if I die next week? What if she were so grieved, she claimed Davy was hers and was disgraced? What if she let every goddamn cat out of the bag? Her spells are worse and worse now. A dying father who isn’t even a father and a troubled mother, all in a city that hates mixed children. And then the Klan came, and oh, we were terrified, because if anyone found out, we’d all be lynched and Davy with us and so we put every cent of my savings and some of Evy’s family money together to save him, we only want to save him, Alice, but I’ll never see my baby boy again, never, and it hurts so much.”

  With my hand on her hair and my arm ’round her back, we stay like that.

  I can’t say I’m sorry.

  I can’t say that isn’t fair.

  Words don’t suffice.

  When her grief quiets—I won’t say ebbs, or lessens, because how could it—by some awfully clever maneuvering I manage to reach our glasses, and we huddle in the sort of stillness that follows a storm at sea.

  “Medea, for God’s sake!”

  The cat, perched on Blossom’s vanity with a feather from one of her hair ornaments in its mouth, yowls and slips to the carpet.

  “I was wondering something,” I venture.

  “What?”

  “Less specifically, I was wondering positively everything. So I thought perhaps it might help if, while you’re so stretched and limber and warmed up to the spilling, it might help for you to tell me about it.”

  She looks hesitant. “As a way to . . . what, pass the time other than whiskey and two-handed whist?”

  “No. Because it matters to me.”

  Blossom looks uncharacteristically pensive.

  “I’ve never in my life tried it before. But . . . I am an intensely professional performer, so. Once upon a time, it is.”

  ◆ Twenty-Four ◆

  THEN

  The affection of gangsters for their own offspring, and even for all children, birds and animals, although perhaps not always the touching and splendid sentiment which the romanticists would have us believe, nevertheless is often real enough.

  —STANLEY WALKER, The Night Club Era, 1933

  When I opened the door, snick-whoosh, to the Hotel Arcadia’s rooftop, a pair of comfortable armchairs were set out with a table between them and a set of crystal stemware, as if Mr. Salvatici expected me, and from the left-hand perch snaked a thin coil from his cigar. The pigeons were snug in their nests, ruffling feathers as their dreams bade them, and their contentment ought to have soothed me.

  I was limp with dread. So I made myself ever so small inside, shook out my shoulders, and sidled up to take my place.

  “Ah, there you are!” Mr. Salvatici flashed his sketched-on smile and reached to pop the bottle of champagne resting in the silver bucket at his feet. “Look here, Nobody—an apology gift. I was out of sorts earlier and never should have subjected you to the sight of Mr. Benenati, no matter that he couldn’t physically intimidate you. Forgive me. I trust that all’s well with Harry and we can now put this entire incident behind us?”

  “Actually, Harry needs close attention.” I sat down as the flutes filled, careful to make the husk in my voice sound like fatigue. “If you don’t watch your back around him, you’ll end up with a robe on it. He admires to make you a crown out of tinfoil and anoint your heirs with frankincense.”

  “Steadfast?”

  “You could set your watch by his whisker growth.”

  “Well, here’s to old associates proven trustworthy, then.”

  We clinked. Gaze fixed to the tiny sea of golden froth in my glass, I wondered where Nicolo was. At a Bronx warehouse, buying enough dynamite to level this place? At Sing Sing, throwing his lot in with the Boss of Bosses now that he knew who had really slaughtered his father? At home, cleaning his tommy gun?

  “My dear young lady,” the Spider questioned gently, “did Nicolo Benenati frighten you somehow?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you carry a rabbit’s foot when you know you’ll
encounter him, and you’re stroking your thumb over it inside your left trouser pocket.”

  It was true. I had the French tonic raised contemplatively before my nose, and my other hand trying to squeeze some luck, any luck, out of a chunk of taxidermied bunny. Draining the bubbles, I stuck my arm out for more.

  “That bad, was it?” Mr. Salvatici sighed. “It’s a damnable thing, how efficient that boy is, and how depraved at the same time.”

  “If he’s depraved, you made him that way.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You killed his father.”

  This pronouncement tore a hole in me so wide that my fear poured right out to pool around our ankles.

  There. You’ve said it.

  Mr. Salvatici had never hurt me, and he wouldn’t start now.

  With legs like jelly, I went to the dovecote and unlatched it, selecting a misty grey bird with the sweetest white bars over her wings. I cradled her as I carried her back. Sat down and watched her fluff herself awake. It was as if I’d set off a bomb and there we sat with a thin high shriek in our ears, watching shrapnel fall like confetti.

  “I’ve been reading your journals,” I continued, eyes on the pigeon. “I’m dreadfully sorry, but I needed to know, and. You’re not my father, are you? My stepfather. You’re my stepfather. In a way.”

  Mr. Salvatici winced minutely, just a crinkle at the edges of his pale eyes. Topping up our drinks, he went to the railing, taking in the glow and stink and glory of Harlem below us, all the lives he played with while his birds wheeled untouched over the melee.

  “You needn’t be frightened, Nobody,” he said softly. “As the man who taught you how to dig for secrets, I can’t be surprised over your unearthing mine, not when I was so careless over them. I suppose . . . I almost wanted you to. That’s cowardly, but I saw no reason to upset you if you were contented. This way, you had the choice whether to learn about me or no.”

  Car horns blared in the distance, and the gentle bird nuzzled my hand. I’d sat here with Mr. Salvatici more times than I could recall, and now in the very center of our ever-so-peaceful oasis all I could see was how he looked the night I staggered into his hotel for the first time—fresh from his bath, half dressed, with kindly old Mr. Benenati’s blood staining the water cherry pink in the next room.