City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (51 page)

I didn’t care. I was happy to have him there, telling me stories, showing me new little cons from the big world. It was almost like having a friend—or another father. I pretended that it could go on like this indefinitely, lulled by the succession of sun, and sand, and salt water. And somehow, I believed, as I had never felt even with my father, that he could keep the worst from happening.

Why should I have been different from anyone else? Everything in Dreamland was as transitory as the sand it was built on, but no one would believe it: not my poor subjects, planning out their gardens and future families, secure in the notion that they would live in the Little City the rest of their days. Not Matty Brinckerhoff, dreaming of tiny model towns that would astound future archaeologists. Most certainly not my exquisite, mad Carlotta, believing she could stay beautiful and mad and innocent forever.

And not the hordes who came to Coney, for a week or an hour: trudging dumbly forward, gazing at all the wonders. Never doubting that things would keep getting better, more incredible. Never doubting that more wonders would be trotted out in perpetuity, for their entertainment, until the old rhetorical question would come to seem like a curse:

Will wonders never cease? Will wonders
never
cease?

Ours was the most credulous of ages, for everything came true. How could you walk through the hissing, gleaming phantasmagoria that were Dreamland and Luna Park, and Steeplechase—past all the electrical wonders, and the exotic tribesmen, the death-defying rides, and the tiny babies fighting for life in their incubators—and not believe in anything, anything at all?

There was something else to keep him in Dreamland, of course—there always is. He had met her out on the beach: a machine operator from one of the garment factories in town. She was sweet enough, intelligent enough: pale, Semitic features, sharp chin, sharp nose, full lips. Nothing exceptional, really.

He brought her to visit sometimes—balancing nervously on a miniature Louis XV chair, trying not to gape at my Carlotta while she went through her mad spiels. I smiled to see how much he was in love with her, no matter how ordinary she was.

Soon, though, I found myself beginning to envy their ordinariness. She was nothing special, I kept assuring myself. Charming in her reticence, almost graceful. A shy little factory girl, to hold hands with, and make love to, and trace great dreams upon. How common, how sentimental, like something from an O. Henry story.

Yet how far it was beyond me. The old dream reawakened: surely, it couldn’t be so impossible, so extraordinary for
me
to find someone like that. There were pretty young girls married to old, fat fools, to simpletons, and cads, to drunks and scoundrels; I know, I saw them every day, in the crowds at the Big Tent.

Why not a dwarf? Why not
me
? All that implacable, irrational longing I had buried under fine carpets and good Madeira came rushing back. To
never
have anything like that. Surely, there would be
someone
for me besides a half-mad sideshow midget—someone
real
.

I saw her at the end of the Grand March. I had just finished slouching around the ring, leading the first parade around the Big Tent before we broke into our nauseating little song, and there she was. Sitting in the front row of the gallery, wearing scarlet ribbons in her curled brown hair. She was wearing a coy little sailor’s suit, virginal white and trimmed with blue, ridiculously girlish, really, but it made her look all the sweeter and more vulnerable.

None of the men could keep their eyes, or their hands, off her. I watched them whispering things to her, their rough whiskers brushing her ears, slipping a hand down along her arms, her thighs, trying to pry open her knees. Testing, always testing her, seeing if they could make her laugh— seeing how far they could go.

She let them do as they pleased. She didn’t put up a fuss, or do more than vaguely brush their hands off her—large, grey eyes staring off forlornly into space, somewhere through the canvas of the big tent.

Something compelled me to impress her, to play to her, to tell her that I—yes,
I
—understood. That out of all the pawing, leering men who converged on her like flies on an ice cream cone splattered on the boardwalk, that
I
understood what she was going through—

Well, isn’t that always the way with men, even normal men, big men, learned and erudite men? To think that they, and they alone, know what a woman wants?

It is incredible how everything else falls away when we fall in love. How beauty, social position, false airs and income, all peel away like the layers of an onion and we see, yes,
we see
how wonderful they are—and how much they need us. To make that astounding presumption—and then the added presumption that if by some stroke of luck rarer than lightning they
do
know—they
do
see how we know them—that somehow they will love us for it in return.

I understood all this—how unlikely it was—but none of it made any difference. Instead, when the song began, I shoved my way to the front, flinging out my arms, bellowing away. Willing to do
anything
in that moment just so she would notice me—in her adorable sailor’s suit, sad grey eyes looking away at nothing.

A real girl, just like the one he had—

When it was time for the baritone to kneel and sing at the end of the song, I sprang forward. I got ahead of him, clamped my hand firmly on his mouth, surprising him so completely that he was still singing when I abruptly pulled my hand off a moment later—then clapped it back on, then off—his
profoundo basso
reverberating like an Indian war cry. And it was funny, it was very funny: the baritone’s eyes widening in shock, glowering murderously at me. Me rolling my eyes, smirking, appealing to the heavens—for all the world a cheap, carny dwarf. For all the world like that small, sick creature in the clown’s suit who whacked the ladies with his electric cattle prod when they stepped off the Steeplechase.

I got her attention. It was very funny; the whole grandstand shook with laughter, and the men forgot her knees for the moment, holding their sides and belching with laughter.

And best of all, she saw
me.
Her whole face turned up at once as she laughed, her eyes still forlorn, the way a child can laugh just after she’s been crying. Looking down at
me
out of all the freakish little people before her.

The band struck up, the crowd began to leave. I followed her with my eyes. As she filed down the steps of the grandstand—the fat lechers still trying to rub up against her, steal a quick feel—I grabbed a painted, wire flower from the hat of a clown, and ran up to present it to her.

She stopped to look at it, truly surprised—and grasping the little metal rose by its petals, cut her finger. Mortified, I whipped out a handkerchief—a huge, endless clown’s handkerchief—and dabbed at her finger with it. She looked alarmed at first—wondering if this was one more cruel Coney joke—but then she let me blot up her wound, smiling beatifically while I quietly drew the joke handkerchief back to myself.

“Thank you,” she told me, as if nobody in the world had ever offered her such a kindness before.

“Thank you,” she repeated, and I was completely smitten, standing there in the circus ring, watching her continue on out with the rest of the crowd, sucking absently at her pierced finger.

I had a love. I was suddenly afraid my feelings were completely, laughably obvious to everyone else and I looked around furtively, but no one else seemed to notice. My fellow performers and citizens were all involved in their regular end-of-the-show hijinks, racing madly about the ring, turning handstands, slugging furiously away at each other.

Carlotta, my queen, was making her speech, giving them a patented royal wave good-bye with her handkerchief. She appeared to be as regally, as sublimely oblivious as ever. Looking at her standing there, I thought she was radiantly beautiful, and that I was certainly, absolutely not in love with
her
anymore. I had a normal woman.

Beansy Rosenthal waddled quickly over to his usual table in the Metropole cafe his handsome, ample flesh jiggling excitedly.

“Tonight’s the night!” he exulted to the men waiting around his table before he had even sat down.

It was after three
A.M.
, but it was still hot and humid as midday inside the Metropole, the giant electrical ceiling fans doing little more than pushing the hot air around, the candle flames and the curtains fluttering rhythmically in the open windows.

“What’s tonight?”

They pushed in reluctantly around the corner booth, Dan the Dude and Boob Walker and Denny Slyfox, making room for Beansy’s big seat.

“Tonight’s the night I get it!”

Oblivious of the looks they gave each other, Herman pulled a hand fan from his suit pocket and began to fan himself. He swept it back and forth over his triumphant, self-satisfied face, the green, tattered cardboard fan advertising
Henderson’s Waterproof Celluloid Collars, Cuffs and Shirt Bosoms—Economical, Durable, Indispensable.
The other gamblers looked down at their drinks, their faces inscrutable.

“ ‘Zat so, Herman?” Dan the Dude asked at last. “An’ just what is that you’re gettin’?”

The music stopped, and they all shut up out of force of habit. It was the Hungarian orchestra’s night off, and here was a ragtime piano player filling in. He had just finished tearing through “The Bunny Hug”—and now he ripped right into “The Oceana Roll.” The cafe was nearly empty, and it was too hot for dancing, but an actress sitting near the front got up and joined in, singing the silly, music-hall words in a low, strangely melancholic voice:

“Just what is it you got comin’?” Dan the Dude asked again.

“Fifteen thousand dollars!” Beansy proclaimed happily. “Not a dime less.”

“They’re gonna pay you fifteen grand? For hollerin’ your head off to the D.A.?” Denny Slyfox repeated incredulously.

“Sure! How’s that for a bargaining tactic? They gimme fifteen thousand, which is what they owe me for shuttin’ down my place, after all, an’ I get lost for a while. Just for a little while, ‘til this blows over.”

“Uh-huh. You told the front page of the
World
how you been
shmeering
a police lieutenant. Howzzat gonna blow over?”

“I dunno,” Herman shrugged contentedly. “I’ll go down, make some money rollin’ the rabbit suckers in Atlantic City for a while, come back an’ say I don’t remember so good. Don’ worry so much! It’s a done deal.”

“Uh-huh.”

The actress sang on. They were all quiet around the table, thinking what they would about Herman’s good fortune.

“C’mon, c’mon! I’m makin’ out fine! Have another round—”

He seized a passing waiter with one of his thick, fleshy hands.

“C’mon, what’s everybody havin’? Just a horse’s neck for me—I gotta stay sober to count my money!”

The waiter departed with their orders and Herman had just turned back to the table when Arnold Rothstein materialized at his shoulder, dapper and gray as always. He rested a hand on Herman’s shoulder and spoke quietly next to his ear.

“Could you come outside a minute, Herman? I got somebody out here wants to see you—”

The other men at the table looked away, or spoke loudly to each other, studiously trying not to hear. Herman Rosenthal’s face split into a beatific grin.

“Ah, ya see there, boys? What’d I tell ya?”

No one said anything, and Rothstein disappeared as quickly and unobtrusively as he had appeared. As soon as he was gone, Denny leaned over the table toward Herman.

“Are you really gonna go out there?” he hissed at Beansy.

“Sure, why not?”

“Herman, Herman. They got anything for you, let that lobbygow bring ’em in here.”

“Ah, listen, there’s nothin’ to worry about. I got it on good authority—”

The waiter returned with their drinks, and Herman took a large gulp from his horse’s neck—ginger ale with a lemon peel. He started to stand up, and Denny gripped his arm.

“Jesus, Beansy, I’m tellin’ ya—don’t move out of this room. They got anything for ya, you let ’em come in here—”

The actress finished her song, and the piano player took a break. In the abrupt silence they could hear a motorcar idling out on Forty-third Street. Smiling, Herman Rosenthal detached Denny’s hand from his coat and stood up.

“Don’ worry. Just don’ let the waiter take my glass. I’m gonna be back here in five minutes with fifteen thousand dollars to finish my drink.”

The big electrical ceiling fans gave another push at the curtains, shoving them out through the open windows, and for a moment they could see the car out there—large and black, with the headlights off and the motor running, three or four faceless heads in the backseat. Then the curtains danced back in, and it was gone.