City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (41 page)

Herman’s face fell.

“I didn’t think a that.”

“Well you gotta
start
thinkin’. You gotta start thinkin’ good an’ hard about everything you do, an’ everywhere you go. Jesus Christ, man, don’ch you understand? Ever since you started to roll out the velvet, there’s a cove on every street corner anxious to see your ground sweat.”

“I didn’t think about it,” Herman said miserably. Then he brightened. “But don’t you worry, Tim. Didn’t you see it? I told ’em you was behind me a hunerd percent. You got nothin’ to worry about.”

“Jay-sus,
Herman,” Big Tim sighed. “Forget about that. Whattaya even doin’ here, all by yerself? Why don’ch you talk to your friend, the D.A., get some protection?”

“Aw, Tim,” Herman smirked. “How would I skin anybody at cards, coupla lousy dicks followin’ me everywhere I go?”

“Herman, Herman. Don’cha see this is for keeps, boy? They want your head before they have their supper.”

“Who? Who does?”

Herman looked absolutely bewildered at the idea that anyone would want to hurt him.

“You
know
who, Herman. Look, why don’cha just let the whole thing blow away? Tell the D.A. you’re sorry, but your memory’s shot to hell. Give Charlie Becker his money as a sign of good faith, then get out of town for a while.”

“Give Becker
his
money? The way I figure it, he owes
me
money!”

Beansy Rosenthal was more hurt and resentful than ever, and there was a childlike petulance in his voice Big Tim had heard before, and that he knew could bode no good.

“Look, Herman, just whattaya think yer gonna get out of all this, anyway?” he asked softly, trying a new tack.

“Fifteen thousand,” Rosenthal told him. “Fifteen grand for shutting me down. That’s figurin’ lost operating profit, equipment costs—the whole
shmeer.
Fifteen thousand, an’ then maybe I’ll leave town—”

“C’mon, Herman. Who’s gonna come up with that kind of cash for ya? New York is a nine-day town. You lay low somewhere out in Jersey for a while, an’ everything’ll blow over.”

“No! I just want what’s comin’ to me, is all.”

The wobbly, gelatinous face suddenly hard, the chin thrust out obstinately.

“Oh, Jesus, Herman! What’s comin’ to ya is a quick death an’ a nice funeral—if you’re lucky. Can’t you see that?”

He knew even as he said it that he had gone too far. Herman Rosenthal looked stunned at the bluntness of his words. His mouth wobbled open, and his eyes welled up.

“That’s simply the way it is, man,” Sullivan said more softly, starting to back out of the Metropole’s luxurious lobby.

“But aren’t you my friend, Tim? Aren’t you behind me?”

“It don’t figure whether I am or not. No one can keep you safe, from a whole city. Not even me.”

He turned and walked away, leaving Herman standing there looking like he was about to cry. There was no hope for it, he knew, so why did he still feel bad? It wasn’t his lookout to save fools from themselves. He had warned him, hadn’t he? He had warned him, what more could he do?

A little later that night, Big Tim Sullivan finished his latest whiskey and climbed slowly up the steps of the diving bell onto Mott Street. A shadow moved out from behind a lamppost as he staggered along.

“Fresh girlies!” it hissed, a thin, greenish face staring up at him in the lamplight.

“Fifty cents. Young! Very young!”

He pushed on past, still trying not to think about Herman. He had never hurt anyone but himself. No one but himself, and Nell, and what was his obligation there? There had been no sons, no children at all. She hadn’t been comfortable with his normal, manly desires, so what was he to do?

Yet he could still see her on the deck of that excursion boat up to Bear Mountain, just after they were married. Her teeth showing as she laughed, one hand holding on to her hat against the wind. So fresh, so young, her skin so white—

He remembered, too, the disgust on her face as she turned away from him. The look of sheer loathing.

He stopped in the middle of Mott Street, and looked back to where the dangler was still lurking behind his lamppost, hissing at the passersby.

“Young girlies! Very young!”

He was drunk, he knew, which was not a good state in which to do anything. He could just as easily go home, have another drink, fall into a deep and oblivious sleep. But it was that hour of the night when a man’s desires become inextricably entangled. He wanted to do anything, anything at all, no matter what it was.

On Sunday, Kid took her over to Wormwood’s Monkey Theatre, to see The Greatest Aggregation of Educated Animals on Earth. “Educated” was the operative word, used to pull it over the rubes. There were none of the big lion-tamer acts, the trained horses, or the diving elephants. Just hundreds of smaller animals—monkeys and chickens, anteaters and lemurs—cackling and fluttering madly about onstage, pecking out addition problems, and juggling milk bottles.

For the grand finale the animals acted out a drama entitled “The Pardon Came Too Late.” A squad of uniformed monkeys set out to electrocute a chicken, which they strapped down into a tiny, highly realistic electric chair, with all the efficiency of real prison guards. Meanwhile, across the stage, a lemur scribbled timidly at a scrap of paper. He rolled it quickly up and stuffed it into the long snout of the anteater, which then slogged its way slowly, agonizingly over toward the prison scene—the crowd slowly reduced to helpless fits of laughter.

It looked as if the anteater might finally make it, the monkeys were taking so long in their frenzied, officious monkey ways: pushing the chicken’s head down, strapping its feet together, then apart, forcing its beak open for the leather gag. When the anteater was waylaid by a sudden torrent of—
ants.

The crowd was screaming, raging with laughter, as the anteater scuttled back and forth across the stage, snorting up its meal. Esther was laughing, too, though she didn’t know why, though she hated the whole, awful idea of the animal play. She laughed along the way she did in the movie parlors at people being slapped and punched, and falling down—out of sheer tension, and helplessness.

The anteater still dawdled over his meal. The chicken raised a final, futile squawk as the monkeys bore it down. One of them pulled down an enormous, red switch—and for a few, long seconds the stage went dark. Then a bolt of lightning split through the blackness, and the animals let up one long, terrible shriek together. The audience, convulsed with laughter just a moment before, was shrieking now, too, in mindless terror and delight.

Then the lights went on again—to reveal a steaming, fully prepared plate of fried chicken sitting in the electric chair. The crowd laughed and applauded, the house lights went up, and they all made their way to the exits, ignoring the monkeys who bowed and doffed their prison guards’ caps behind them on the stage.

“My golden heart,” Kid said when he saw she was frowning, as they came out of the theatre into the blinding glare of midafternoon Coney. “My little
kalleh
—what make you?”

“I don’t know,” Esse told him, shaking her head, taking the arm he offered, unsure herself what was bothering her. “It’s just so—stupid, so mindless.”

“Ah, that’s what’s bothering you. Never mind. Come— come with me.”

He walked her up past the grand hotels: the Manhattan Beach, and the Hotel Brighton, and the Oriental. Magnificent, matchstick birdcages, with great blue tea tents out on the lawn and green awnings, and pennants flying from each turret.

Kid took her into the Brighton, where you could get a glass of champagne for ten cents-the bar jammed with sunburned men and women, stinking of the sea and the fried-food stands along the boardwalk. The champagne was mostly flat, and it left a burning aftertaste in her mouth, but Esther drank it down anyway, then had another glass when he offered it to her. She stood at the bar and watched the other men, particularly the older men, feeding it to the women bathers as quickly and eagerly as they could. They laughed with their heads thrown back, drunken and red-faced, and let the men put their arms around their shoulders.

Esther put her glass down and left the hotel without another word to him, her head spinning a little.

If she was to do this she would do it under her own power, by God

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” he clucked, following her solicitously out onto the evening boardwalk.

She didn’t answer him, because she couldn’t trust herself to say anything. They walked along in silence, back to where he lived in the Tin Elephant. Esther knew it, she had seen the strange little hotel many times, though she had never been in. Now she walked right up the winding metal staircase, still without saying a word—past the whores hanging out over the balcony in their underwear, smoking languidly, waiting for the first customers of the night. They smirked to see her, but she only smiled back at them, feeling a little dazed.

So this is what it’s like to be a whore?

Back in the bowels of the Elephant, she could hear one of them strumming a mandolin. It was an old song she had heard before, sung by the Irish girls on Chrystie Street, back when Lazar still lived with them.

She climbed up the rest of the stairs and went to his rooms, which looked exactly as he had described them: crammed back in the telltale, scatalogical curve of the Elephant’s Arse. When he unlocked the door she went in and sat on the bed, and took off her hat.

Kid stood watching her for a little while, over by the one dresser, warped and scarred by the sea. Then he walked over to where she sat, and Esther lifted up her arms to him, and held him around the neck, and kissed him on the mouth while he was still standing over her.

He pulled her up, and she let him, still kissing him, holding him fast around his neck and his shoulders. He began to undress her, slowly pulling off the green-and-gold mermaid’s bathing suit, and she let him do that, too. She let him lower her to the bed again, until she was sitting naked on his bedspread, trembling a little there despite the heat that was like the inside of an oven.

And when he moved to kiss her again, still fully clothed himself, she let him. She let him kiss her anywhere he wanted to, she let him do anything he wanted to do. She made love to him right out there on top of his bed, so unlike their hidden coupling by the pigeon coop, so
blatant.

And afterwards, when they were lying crammed together on his narrow bed—the sweet saltiness of their underarms and thighs intermingling, tasting of the sea and the sun from the afternoon—it was she who reached for him again, she who led him slowly through it all again, until they were both satisfied.

So this is what it’s like to be a whore—

—she thought, lying on her back. Lying naked on a whore’s bed, in a hotel for whores, out on Coney Island.

What did it mean? Was she a whore like the women outside in the hall? Like what the men, the cops and goons always called them on the picket lines?

She looked over at him, and he gazed back at her adoringly. She had all she could do to keep from laughing, pleased and triumphant as she was.

So this is all it takes—

“You are an angel—” he started to say.

She giggled—the way she imagined a whore might—and hit him with the pillow. He looked stunned for a moment— then grinned, and pulled the pillow away. They struggled for a little while more on the bed, laughing.

“I have to go,” she said finally, subsiding.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t?”

“Stay with me tonight.”

“All night?”

“And the next night, an’ the night after that.”

“What would they say? I got to get back.”

She got up from the bed, starting to walk around to retrieve her clothing where it had been strewn in such haste. When she did, she noticed that the door of the dresser was open, and there was a full-length mirror on the inside.

How strange, how unreal it was to see herself naked, in this dull, spotty mirror, in a dilapidated tourist hotel. The glass so marred and scratched up by the sea salt, and by years of uncaring guests, that she could barely make herself out. The light wasn’t very good either. It was late in the evening now, the sun was already setting a little earlier, and the only illumination coming into the room was the refracted glow from the amusement parks, shining behind them on the beach.

But she could see herself there—as she had not seen herself since she was a little girl. As she had never expected to see herself, in such a place.

So this is what it’s like to be a whore

Her hair, unpinned, flowing straight down her back, the way only actresses or women in the dirty postcards they sold up by Surf Avenue wore it. Her large brown eyes wide, full lips open in surprise, as if she were about to say something. It was her, all right, though she could not have identified the rest of herself before: the sinewy, slightly worn figure; full, spaced breasts; wide thighs and hips, one a little higher than the other.

That was just her, she thought in wonder. That was all she was.

He reached out and pulled her back to the bed in the narrow room.

“Stay,” he whispered to her. “Stay. Please.”

“I can’t,” she said again, unconvincingly.