City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (50 page)

Then one night, at the height of the evening, when all the girls were busy and the piano player was taking his break, she had left her room between customers to get some water. Tiptoeing downstairs, she had seen the customers sitting there, calmly smoking and swinging their feet, sitting in the parlor like men awaiting their turn at the barber’s.

That was the night she left the house, after prying open the little tin safe she knew the madam kept. She was determined to find her mother and sisters, and this time she succeeded. This time, searching until nearly all her money had run out, refusing to go back to the street even for a night, she finally found her mother and one of her sisters living up in the Bronx, on Jerome Avenue, just off the Grand Concourse. And when she finally did—when her mother opened the door and stared on her like she had returned from the dead—she could not help but burst into tears.

That was when she discovered that Mama believed her to be forever marked by the whore in the courtyard. Mama had heard about her, had even known where she was for months, and now she would not take her back.

“Your sister Deborah is gone, too!” Mama had told her, furious—Sadie’s other sister, Rebecca, looming silent and gaunt as a ghost in the hall behind her, a stranger to her.

“Because of you—because of that
nafkeh
downstairs!”

“I just want to help. I brought this—” Sadie offered, holding out the few coins and bills she still had left. Her mother pushed her hand away.

“Bah! Do you think that you can sneeze and blow away the past? It’s too late, too late! God help you. May your name and your memory be forever blotted out of this earth!”

She couldn’t go back to the good house after that, of course, and she had wound up with another pimp, and lost the rest of her money. Soon she had been reduced to trawling under the elevated on Allen Street, and the Bowery, peeking out from behind the pylons, along with the other soiled doves. Until that night, looking for customers, cold and miserable, scared half to death the next one would mark her or take all her money, she had held out her hand to the man who turned out to be her Lazar:

Gimme a penny, mister?

And he had taken her in hand. He bought her some new clothes, and got her the first good meal she’d had in a week. For a while she had made a good living again, up in the Tenderloin, and the swank new hotels off Times Square. She was still young, and men liked her figure, and she knew from hard experience how to make them laugh and put them at their ease.

Sadie was just grateful to have enough to eat again, a warm place to sleep, and good clothes. He used her to entertain other gangsters and pols he was especially interested in, and to do little odd jobs, and he was satisfied as long as she did what she was told.

She thought for a long time, too, that maybe he liked her. Love, she told herself, was a thing of ice-cream-soda dreams, but he must at least like her. Why else, after all, would he feed her and clothe her in fine new dresses? Why would he have her put ribbons in her hair and keep herself up? He had other girls, other business; he
must
like her. Maybe, she even dared to let herself believe, he was the reason for everything she had been through—the rape on the roof, and her mother’s rejection, and even the dead woman down in the courtyard apartment.

Slowly, slowly, she had disabused herself of this notion. It was the hardest thing she had ever done, harder even than willing herself to live in that unspeakable basement room. He didn’t like her. He was not in love with her. She knew it from a hundred, a thousand little things over the years: a disgusted glance, a word, the lack of his touch, his expression in a mirror or a windowpane, when he thought she wasn’t looking.

Still, she had put it all aside; blaming it on her graying hair, her own mistakes. Still walking the streets for him, still performing the little tasks he told her to do. Afraid of him, afraid of what she would be without him.

But he did not love her. That was the final, incontrovertible fact. And when she realized that, she let herself go for a while, not caring, thinking she might as well die from the curse, or some thug’s knife under the Bowery el, than to live out this life.

And then, that day out on Hester Street, she inveigled the dress peddler while he poisoned the horse. She stood there, watching the magnificent animal lying on its side in the street, and she decided the same thing she knew, back in the lineup room: she wanted to live.

After that, she started to think, and save for herself again. Yet Sadie still didn’t know just how to leave him. It would have to be a clean break, so that he would have no idea of how to find her.

A few weeks after the horse, he came back to the el to give her another job. He only shook his head when she showed him what little she had made that day. She was holding out on him like crazy now, but he didn’t even suspect, that was how little he thought of her charms.

“I want you to follow somebody for me,” he informed her.

“Follow somebody? I don’t know if I can do that so good.”

“You’re no good out here anymore, you goddamned well better be able to do this,” he said, his eyes cold and contemptuous. “Otherwise you’re no use to me at all.”

He wanted her to follow his sister, Esse. He took her past the tenement on Orchard Street to make sure she knew what she looked like, even though they had met before. Lazar had brought her over to meet her—one of his larks. And afterwards Esse had come down to see
her
, where she worked under the elevated, and tried to talk her into going into a settlement house, or getting a factory job.

At most people, she would have laughed. The only thing Sadie could imagine worse than dying in a Water Street dive, screaming of the curse, was going back to the box factory where she had worked as a girl—folding up cardboard boxes fourteen hours a day.

Yet she was touched by the sister’s concern. It wasn’t like the Reform women, or the Christian missionaries, who always seemed to be trying to run up their quotas of saved souls, offering her something they knew she didn’t really deserve. Besides the guilt and shame she felt over Lazar, she seemed really worried about Sadie.

“But can’t you see the risk you’re running here? How can this be any life for you?” Esse had finally insisted, and Sadie had let her down gently.

“An’ what do you got to offer me instead?” she had pointed out. “A slow death, every day? At least this way, I have a little fun.”

The sister had seemed crestfallen.

“I know, I know. But it don’ seem right.”

“Don’ worry about me—”

She had a brief fantasy of them as true sisters-in-law, living down the hail from each other. Sipping tea in the afternoon, in each other’s apartments. Making big family dinners together on the holidays, with all their children around the table—and maybe her own sisters, and her mother, too—

It will never be
, she told herself, watching as Esse retreated through the elevated’s wavering shadows.

That life will never happen for me

And now he wanted her to spy on Esse. This was another new development, and one that seemed to her to have some potential if she played the angles right. She had no idea how yet, but it was obviously something he wanted, and if that were the case she would make what she could out of this, and see how well he liked it.

The next Sunday, Sadie was waiting when Esse came out of the Orchard Street house, skipping quickly down the stoop, past the German saloon with its golden-horned goat out front. A woman not unlike herself, with long brown hair and large, brown eyes, full lips. A little thinner than Sadie was, with wear and work—though that was changing, too, she reflected a little sadly, her own flesh melting away as she grew older under the el.

Sadie followed her onto the trolley, up to Grand Central, then switched to the train with her inside the new, dazzling white terminal. There Esse got on the New York & Sea Beach line, taking it out through the long flatlands of Brooklyn, all the way to Coney Island, and Sadie followed her—out of the station, and down Surf Avenue.

The sunlight struck her like a sudden slap. Sadie turned her face up to it instinctively, closing her eyes and holding her hands out to either side, like a supplicant. She had worn an old, shapeless black dress—the better to be inconspicuous, but completely inappropriate for the beach. Still, she felt herself now drenched in the clean, dry heat, right down into her bones.

It had been years since she had been out to Coney; the last time had been the summer when she tried working the Brighton Beach hotels and the Steeplechase for a season. But it reminded her now of when she had been a little girl, and their mother had taken them to the beach for the day. Then she had stayed in the water for as long as she could, until she was shivering with cold, and Mama had called her in to have one of the chicken sandwiches she had made. She had snatched her up, dried her with an old blanket and laid her down to warm on the sand, letting the sun soak through her bathing costume, her underwear, her skin, until she was dry and warm like she had never been before.

She could still see Esse’s figure up ahead, walking swiftly, purposefully toward some attraction or meeting place. Dazed with sun, she stumbled after her as best she could, passing into Dreamland at the main gate, under the wings of an enormous, naked angel with breasts so magnificent they would have made her the most popular girl on the Bowery.

What she could be here for, other than the rides, and the attractions, Sadie could only guess. Lazar had told her simply to follow his sister, and to keep track of anyone she met, anyone she talked to. Now, to her surprise, she saw her go up to a man—and one she recognized, in a gangster’s flashy suit and bowler. He took her tenderly by the arm and greeted her with a kiss on the cheek, genteel as any long-married husband.

Sadie felt a deep pang of jealousy, but she kept following them along the boardwalk. It wasn’t hard: they strolled slowly along the boards, gazing out at the sea, leaning a little on each other, oblivious to anyone else. Then, to her further amazement, they turned in at a seedy, tin hotel for prostitutes, shaped like a giant elephant.

Sadie stood outside, contemplating the hotel for a few minutes, noting where a small, yellow light came on. Then she walked back along the boards, knowing everything she needed to know.

She had met a man. The sister had met a man; it was something Gyp would like to know—especially considering who the man was.

She wandered back along Surf Avenue, wondering just how to play this one. She bought an ice cream cone, then a pink-and-blue cloud of cotton candy, and a beer. She even rented a bathing costume, a pretty little sailor’s suit, from one of the bathing pavilions along the beach, and walked down through the sand in her bare feet, basking in the sun and running her toes through the water.

She met a man—

After the beach, Sadie had walked back into the parks, and went to see the diving elephants, and the one-armed lion tamer at Bostock’s Circus, and a funny little show made up completely of dwarves and midgets. One of the dwarves gave her a metal flower, and she cut her finger on it, but he had been very nice to her, and had wrapped the cut up in a handkerchief. He was a misshapen little man, with a big head and tiny, sawed-off arms and legs that made her shiver inside.

He gazed up at her meaningfully when he handed her his handkerchief but she was too distracted to figure out what he wanted. She took the flower, and wandered along the boardwalk again, stopping by the Tin Elephant, under the little square of yellow light she had seen go on earlier. It was still on, and she waited patiently, watching the whores wandering in and out with johns they had found on the midway, or the Ziz coaster. Watching them eye her curiously, hostilely, as more competition. For that’s what she was, a whore—

She met a man—

Gyp would give a lot to find out these things, she knew. Maybe enough to get herself free, even set up on her own. And wasn’t that what the woman on the courtyard had been saying to her mama? That a whore was always justified, for who looked out for a whore but herself?

Then again, it could be risky. Lazar would hate whoever told him, she knew that. And either way, it was still doing his bidding, depending upon his mercy. And she did like the sister, even if she was lucky enough to be in love.

She stood, and thought, and waited for a long time more. Until after dark, when his sister finally came out again, and Sadie trailed her slowly back up the boardwalk. Back to the train and the City, where Gyp was waiting to hear her report. And just what that would be, she hardly knew herself.

I didn’t mind when that big fake Mexican left. I knew it made it all the more likely that
he
would find us, but I didn’t care. I was just as glad to have the other one all to myself.

He should have run, too, after that. He should have hopped the first boat around the Horn, a train to California, a steamer down the islands—anywhere he could go, so long as it was far away from that monster.

I told him as much—yet I knew he never would. Only the outlaw can never quite bear to leave home. Instead he stayed around, waiting for—what?

And then, as the days went by, and neither Spanish Louie nor any of Gyp’s
boychiks
showed up, we both began to think that they never would. Maybe Louie was smarter than any of us knew, maybe he had lit out for the territories himself without telling any of us. Maybe he had just let us
think
he was going to saunter back into his old haunts and let Gyp the Blood get his balls in a wringer.