The Paragon Hotel

by Lyndsay Faye

  It took only that long.

  Three seconds of attention on me and Nicolo had whipped out an FN Vest Pocket shooter. He didn’t aim it at Harry, though. Because Nicolo, my dearest, my brightest young love, had lost his mind.

  He aimed it at Rye and fired.

  Rye was already half draped over me. I did move, though. Between Harry flicking his eyes to me and Nicolo pointing his backup heater at Zachariah Lane, I pushed in close, and the bullet ripped its merry way through yours very truly, who made not a sound as I fell into the hay.

  That was dreadfully stupid, I thought first.

  But at least now he knows, I understood as I stared up into Rye’s fully awake and horrified face.

  “For him?” I heard Nicolo screaming. “For that pezzo di merda?* You keep my father’s murder a secret and now you make me do this to you?”

  Harry, I saw through spasming eyelashes, was already taking the second gun away from my disintegrating friend. He threw it yards off into the murk of the corridor.

  “Fucking shoot me,” Nicolo howled. “Bastard, go on and pull the trigger!”

  “Can’t oblige youse, mister, the Spider hires you too much. I needs his say-so.”

  “If you don’t bleed out from that, I will finish it,” Nicolo spat at me. “Or somebody else will. I sent word to Dario. Cleto the Crow. In case the Spider was too cunning, they know, Alicia, they all know, and if anything happens to me, they will tear you apart.”

  Gasping, battling the deluge of pain, I watched Harry shove his gun muzzle against the back of Nicolo’s head. Still snarling a mixture of threats and dares to put an end to him, Nicolo had no choice but to let Harry muscle him into one of the stalls. Plenty had bars that went all the way to the ceiling, because they weren’t for horses, were they, and the plank Harry slammed into place could have done awfully serviceable work locking a castle gate.

  Harry’s crooked face was stricken when he knelt beside me. Lifting my sweater without ceremony, he looked at the twin pocks pumping hot blood onto my trousers.

  Then he twisted the sweater into a bunch, pressed down, and I shrieked so loud even the jaded horses took notice.

  “Easy, kid. Settle down now.”

  I quieted, panting at the ceiling in disbelief over how dreadfully poorly my day had gone.

  “That’s right. I gots you.”

  He pulled me up, propelling me toward the entrance. A city block distant. A lifetime. A ruined existence, an unraveled future.

  When we reached the threshold, I staggered but didn’t fall, and turned to face him with my life crumbling to ashes around me.

  “I’s gonna miss you, kid,” Harry said, planting a wet kiss on my brow. “Now, run.”

  “Harry—”

  “Run, kid!”

  “But I—”

  “Damn it, Nobody, hitch a ride to the moon. You’re dead to this town now, you hear?” Harry pulled a hand down his jowls. “I swear to you, I’ll find a body somewheres. Trust me, kid. You died today. Now, run.”

  It was the only time during our friendship I ever knew Harry to be optimistic—running was impossible. I staggered westward, my sweater clutched against my torso. The first time I was shot, the shock of it tipped me straight into dreamland. This time, though, I couldn’t be bothered to faint.

  Nobody was coming to my rescue. So I walked.

  I stepped through the front door of the Hotel Arcadia, and a maid screamed at the sight of me.

  My vision flickered out. I blinked it back on again.

  In my room, I drank three swigs of whiskey and felt ever so much better.

  I cleaned myself with soap and a wet rag, and during that hygienic lark decided screaming was absolutely the done thing for metropolitan hotels, and tried it myself. Twice.

  Thick bandages were located and cotton wadded and my torso wrapped like the veriest mummy.

  I packed a large carpetbag and a valise with an array of clothing and arranged for a porter to drive me to Grand Central Station.

  More whiskey followed.

  I retrieved the fifty thousand dollars in impeccable counterfeit bills from Mr. Salvatici’s safe. Being familiar with the combination, and instructed to invest the funds as I saw fit.

  The porter arrived to hoist my luggage and ferry me to midtown Manhattan.

  At the station, I purchased a cross-country ticket.

  And then I boarded a train.

  ◆ Twenty-Five ◆

  NOW

  Illicit relationships between the races have not gone on without causing many a troubled conscience. Nor has a difference in color always deadened the feelings of the human heart. In spite of laws and color lines, human nature, wherever found, is profoundly alike.

  —RAY STANNARD BAKER, Following the Color Line, 1908

  There are Nabiscos and Fig Newtons in Blossom’s vanity, plenty of water and whiskey, and after a lightning sprint to my room for licorice and medicine, there’s the makings of a nifty picnic on her coverlet.

  “God, thank you.” Blossom chases down four Bayer tablets—aspirin, not heroin—with water and a cookie.

  “Best I can do until Dr. Pendleton arrives,” I say ruefully. “Should I be stanching a wound, by the way?”

  “It’s really just a whopping amount of bruising.” It pains her to speak, but she’d be climbing out of her own ears if she weren’t. “It was the conk to the melon that had me so out of commission earlier. But there’s something about opening your soul with a scalpel that does wonders for drowsiness.”

  “Speaking of which. What did you do before you moved to San Francisco?” I select a licorice. “You toured, I can tell that much.”

  “Oh, very good, honey,” she approves. “Yes, I was with a little Negress company, singing and dancing from Des Moines to Baltimore. Theater was in the blood, you know. Mum was a costumer, did laundering and repair work for the white companies and original design for the black ones back in Chicago, everything from vaudeville to parade floats. That was Daisy Howard—dear Uncle Doddridge’s half sister. Dad was a stage carpenter, Mr. Solomon Howard, and they met when he was building the set for a colored production of La Cenerentola.”

  She pauses.

  “What is it?” I break into the package of Fig Newtons.

  “Aren’t you going to ask?”

  “Ask what?”

  Blossom gives me a look so withering, I turn briefly into a raisin.

  “All right, fine, yes! And you were?”

  “Young Mr. Henry Howard, rascal at birth.”

  She tips her whiskey glass at me. We clink.

  “And were you always . . .”

  “As you see me?” She rubs at the back of her neck. “Yes. My parents had the sweetest stories of me raiding my mother’s costume collections—and like many artistic types, they really thought nothing of it. The shiny colorful fripperies were there, of course I played with them. By the time I was around ten, yes, they vehemently suggested that I curb the feathers. They were probably desperately worried I might end up an invert, and they’d have to have fireside chats with me about confirmed bachelorhood. Then puberty arrived and wonder of wonders! I adored girls. I chased them. I befriended them. I did all the usual things you’re not meant to do with them. No, liking girls not the problem.”

  “What was the problem?”

  Blossom stares into her scotch. “The problem was I was one. I suppose I sound rampantly insane, but the person on the other side of the looking glass wasn’t me. It was a boy I knew named Henry. What do you see when you peacock?”

  “Nobody.”

  “No, but really.”

  “Really. You’ve seen me as two people other than this one, I’ve concocted too many more to count, and I suppose this one is . . . the least effort.” My chest feels heavy. “Sometimes I even dream I’m those other Nobodies. The girls who don�
�t exist except when I’m their skin.”

  Blossom stares, rapt. “You are fascinating.”

  “You were saying,” I retort.

  “I was saying Blossom Fontaine was who I was, but she wasn’t what I looked like. When my parents died in a motorcar accident when I was sixteen, I was so berserk with grief that I decided to get rid of myself altogether. The circumstances made it shockingly easy. I was already a performer. I’d been playing dress-up since practically birth. Everything I needed was in Mum’s stock, I auditioned there in Chicago as Blossom Fontaine, and when I got a touring gig, I left. C’est tout. At first I was simply the shyest, dearest virgin in the dressing room, but after I learned taping and how to shape my pectorals from other odd individuals, that wasn’t such a problem either.”

  “Did you ever miss yourself?”

  Blossom sighs. “I never knew him very well. Do you miss Alice?”

  “Sometimes,” I whisper.

  “You needn’t, you know,” she says softly. “I suspect she’s sitting right here.”

  I swallow, picking crumbs off Blossom’s bed. “You’ve been to Paris, you said. Was that simply everything? Divine music wafting up from the cobbles and gold-plated baguettes?”

  “Ah, oui, bien sûr. I’d gotten as far as New York City and was performing at a simply atrocious nightclub, the sort where people who are decadent go when they want to pretend they’re not being decadent. But the set I’d put together was entirely French, and one night a Gallic fellow came in who took an interest. No, not that sort of interest—he couldn’t have weighted a loafer down with a lead shoehorn. But he did take me to Paris,” she recollects dreamily. “I had everything there. Even the diamonds came with a side of fresh butter. It was a Cinderella romance without the sex.”

  “That’s the awfullest fib I’ve ever heard!” I laugh. “Max says French women are welcoming to all sorts.”

  Blossom makes a gallant effort at a smirk. “Then I am ever so gratified to learn that Maximilian and I share our opinion of Parisian women, which is something the dear boy could never tell me himself.”

  Chin on hand, I question, “How many?”

  “What an unthinkably invasive question, Alice James.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Six months.”

  “Three?”

  “Oh, honey,” she reproves.

  Grinning, I double the figure. “Six?”

  “Eleven. If you count the one I decided to bed without taking any of my kit off, just to see if I could make her happy. I made her very happy, Alice. Twice. Yes, I count her.”

  “So shall she be counted. But whyever would you leave?”

  Her smile evaporates. “I did say I’ve had worse beatings than this one.”

  “You were attacked?” I exclaim.

  “Three drunk boulevardiers wanting a taste of blood sport. This sort of thing happens in Paris too. New York. San Francisco twice, I lived there longest. And now Portland. You don’t suppose creatures like me always pass unnoticed, do you? I’m astonishingly proficient, but. Still.”

  Aghast, I can only say, “You made every one of them bleed for it, though.”

  “Oh, not in Paris. Christ, I was a mess. After recovering enough, I decided to cut out for a place that was actually mine, and that meant returning to America. Must’ve lived in some half a dozen cities before arriving in San Francisco, and, Alice, the moment I arrived, I was gone on the place.”

  I refluff my pillow. “Candy-colored houses and salt winds and Bohemians, and you sang at the Pied Piper Bar at the Palace Hotel.”

  Blossom points a finger at me slyly. “You have the memory of a woman up to no good whatsoever, you know.”

  “I do,” I admit ruefully.

  “When I stepped off the train at the Third and Townsend Depot, I’d never seen anything like it. It’s just a quaint Mission-style terminal, but the people. Mexicans touting street food, Orientals carting barrels of produce, white lunatics dragging tin cans, and everyone in the most lawless hodgepodge.” She smiles. “Once I’d hiked from China Basin to downtown, standing in Union Square with ridiculously cold gusts in my face even though the sun was shining like anything, I made up my mind. It was perfect. I don’t pretend it’s utopia—blacks mostly work in the shipyard over at Bay View, but it was proudly, frankly mad. I felt ever so cozy.”

  “So you set up shop?”

  “Yes, on Drumm Street in the thick of it all. They’d never have let me get away with that, it’s as crawling with racists as any place, but they adore Europeans and I made out as if I were fresh off the boat from Paris.”

  “And you polished the pipes and burst into song.”

  “Yes, first at smaller venues, and then at the Pied Piper.”

  “To great acclaim, I suppose.”

  When she falls silent, I realize that I must look like a nitwit waiting for the moment in the film when the ethereal woman walks into the bar, a day or so before she becomes the heroine, and these are decidedly not the circumstances.

  “You don’t have to tell me any of this. Lord, I’m a dolt. Skip to—”

  “I didn’t meet Evy at the Pied Piper,” she corrects me. “Evy could never have gotten into the Pied Piper, this was before Prohibition, mind, fresh-faced young ladies didn’t do that sort of thing. I met her on the street while she was losing her hat.”

  “Oh?”

  Blossom gathers up the ice pack. “San Francisco is nothing but hills, yes? Mountainous things. Anyhow, the wind whips ’round them like anything, and I was walking down one while Evy was walking up, and this small hurricane tore her hat off, and there was this hair.”

  Since I yen to smile, I stop preventing myself.

  “And as she was watching the hat fly off into oblivion, she laughed, and I don’t know if you’ve heard her laugh, but Jesus.”

  My smile grows.

  “And I said, ‘Oh, what a shame,’ and she said, ‘Never mind, I lost my umbrella yesterday and I think it was pining. It wouldn’t do to keep them apart.’”

  Pouring more whiskey seems sage. “You were taken with her.”

  “Alice, I was broken,” Blossom groans.

  “After two sentences.”

  “Gracious no, honey, after the hat came off.”

  “And you knew it would only get worse.”

  “Which was why I had to pencil down where I was staying so she could write to me, and she insists that she never supposed that was madness, a black songstress foisting her address on a young white woman studying the humanities. She was at Sacred Heart Academy in Menlo Park, which is miles from the city, Alice—she was only on that street because she had wandered completely fearlessly away from her tour group. And I was only there because I had broken the heel on my favorite pair of boots and was coming back from the cobbler. It still frightens me how easily I might not have met her.”

  The grief she now suffers seems not to play into this equation. As if it hadn’t occurred to her they were connected.

  “So you were correspondents first?”

  “We were the authors of unrepentant reams, honey.” Blossom’s lashes fall closed. “I was twenty-eight, but we may as well have been schoolgirls passing notes. A letter a day, I think, during the really ripping periods. Once I wrote her twice and forced myself to delay posting the second. She would write to me about Sacred Heart, the nuns, recipes she was tinkering with, but the poetry, the sheer brilliant nonsense. I would carry them everywhere, walking into street signs. As for me, I couldn’t hear a joke or learn a ditty or think a thought without telling her about it. Then summer break came, and I was given the shock of my entire life, bar none.”

  “Sounds awfully promising.”

  “One afternoon there came a knock at my door,” Blossom says with a thrill in her voice, “and who is standing there upon my opening it but my friend Evel
ina Starr with a suitcase?”

  Evelina had, it seems, many times written of her dear new friend to her parents back in Portland. Some details were factual—that Blossom was from Chicago and a few years older and recently returned from a six-month lark in France. Other details possessed less basis in science. Blossom’s name, for example, was Bernice Plank—one that Blossom claims Evy invented specifically to bedevil her—and this spinster Blossom lived with her own mother and father when she wasn’t touring the Continent or praying for orphans. Evelina planned to pass the summer with the Plank family. Wouldn’t that be nice?

  As for the color of Bernice Plank’s skin, Evelina didn’t see any reason for mentioning it.

  “She marched into my apartment, set her case down, and threw her arms around my neck,” Blossom says with a faint smile that speaks more than any brighter expression. “I’d met her once on a public street, once, but we’d written so much that it was like she was mine, and I admired to know what that felt like. I didn’t say no. I could have, but. I loved her.”

  The pair lived together for two months. Evy experienced one nervous attack, but since she had already described the condition, no one was surprised. The rest passed in a sort of frenzied tranquillity. Blossom smuggled Evelina some dozens of times into the Pied Piper disguised as a mute Englishman aesthete who wore his remarkable hair in a long queue (which in San Francisco apparently passes without comment). They could also go anywhere Blossom might be assumed to be Evy’s hired companion—so they explored galleries and museums, attended female rights lectures, walked through the parks arm in arm.

  They were fiercely, quietly happy. Evelina cooked elaborate suppers while Blossom strummed the guitar. When the fall term approached, however, the inevitable happened.

  “We’d been drinking champagne at home, and she kissed me,” Blossom says quietly. “It broke my heart. I’d thought we could last out the summer, at least I would have that one summer. Of course, I had to tell her. I thought just saying it would be the death of me.”