House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (47 page)

“Repeat that?”

Beckman drank his shot glass empty and set it on the blotter. He opened the cover on his watch and looked at the time. “If I were you, I’d toggle back to my hotel.”

T
HE SUN HAD
gone behind the clouds unexpectedly. A moment later, just as the telephone rang on Ruby’s nightstand, rain began clicking on the French doors that opened on her balcony, glasslike pieces of hail bouncing on the rail. A thunderous boom shook the room. She picked up the receiver.

“This is the front desk, Miss Dansen. A colored man just delivered a message for you,” the clerk said.

“I can hardly hear you. A message from a colored man?”

“No, the colored man delivered the message. He said it was from your son.”

“Stop him.”

“He’s already gone.”

“Send the message up. No, I’ll come down.”

In the elevator she had to press her hand against her chest in order to breathe correctly, to keep her balance, to stop her head from floating away. When she stepped into the lobby, the floor seemed to tilt, the potted palms and marble columns to break into molecules. Outside, sheets of rain slapped against the front of the hotel and whipped the awning over the entrance. “I’m Miss Dansen. Which direction did the colored man go?” she said.

“I didn’t notice, ma’am,” the desk clerk replied. He took an envelope out of her key box and handed it to her. The message was in pencil, the lettering full of ripples, as though written by an unsteady hand. It read:

Dear Mother,

Trust the man of color who brought this. He is as brave and good as the men I commanded on the Marne. I am four blocks away at the end of the alley. I am unable to move or get help. Please come.

Love,

Ishmael

There was a map drawn at the bottom of the notepaper. She went to the lobby window and looked at the rain swirling out of the sky. A hundred questions pounded inside her head. Where was Hackberry? How could Ishmael know where she was staying? Did he overhear his captors talking? Was the colored man the Haitian who had driven Hackberry from Kerrville to San Antonio? If the note was a fraud, how did the hoaxer know of Ishmael’s affection for his troops? Was Maggie Bassett involved? Or was this the miracle she had prayed for?

“Tell the doorman to flag a jitney for me,” she told the clerk.

She went upstairs and put on her coat and her sweater and a long coat and a hat that had a four-inch pin with a purple glass knob shaped like a lily.

Don’t go by yourself,
a voice said.

And do what? Wait on Hack?
she answered herself.
Or call the police officers who kidnapped Ishmael from the clinic?

A tree of lightning burst in the clouds as she ran for the open door of the jitney, a newspaper over her head.

H
ACKBERRY COULDN’T BELIEVE
the change in the weather when he came out of Beckman’s building. The sky was dark, the sidewalks spotting with raindrops, thunder echoing like cannon beyond the hills. He wondered if it signaled a change in his life, the deliverance that had been denied him the day he led a stolen horse up the incline to Beatrice DeMolay’s brothel in Old Mexico.

On the corner, the two black prostitutes had stepped beneath an overhang. He walked toward them and touched the brim of his hat. “I wonder if you ladies could tell me where I can hire a taxi.”

“On the main street, maybe,” one said. “They ain’t none down here.”

“It’s fixing to cut loose,” he said, squinting at the sky.

“The crib is up the alley. If you got the money, we got the time,” said the same woman. “Ain’t no rain in there.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I have someone waiting on me. You know Mr. Beckman very well?”

Both women looked straight ahead, the wind ruffling their hair, their faces impassive, as smooth and dark as chocolate.

“I hear he’s rough on working girls,” Hackberry said.

“You ain’t heard it from us,” said the same woman.

“I heard he hangs them up and beats them with his fists. Mostly Mexican girls. I suspect some black ones, too.”

“Why you telling us that?”

“Maybe you can do a good deed. Stop another girl from getting hurt.”

The spokeswoman for the two looked at the clouds. She was missing a front tooth; a scar like a piece of white string ran horizontally through one eye. “My charge for good deeds is ten dol’ars,” she said.

He took a gold piece from his pocket and opened his palm so she could see it.

“He brung a colored girl to a basement. Not in this part of town. I ain’t said who brung her. I just said ‘he’ brung her. He left her alone and she got out a window. She came back here to get her pimp, and the two of them took off, traveling light.”

“What’s her name? Where did she go?”

The woman took the gold piece from Hackberry’s hand. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

“Where’s the basement?”

“Don’t know that, either.”

“Beckman has my son.”

She put the gold piece in her purse and showed no reaction.

“I’m talking about my son,” he said.

The woman seemed to be drifting off to sleep. Hackberry looked back at the entrance to Beckman’s building and at the broken wood crates stacked on the sidewalk for pickup. “You ever see any Chinamen down here?”

“They don’t kill nobody,” the woman said, opening her eyes.

“I don’t follow you.”

“We know who you are. You the one killed Eddy Diamond.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“You done it just the same.”

“Maybe it was more complicated than you think.”

“You want some jelly roll, baby? If not, beat feet. Ain’t nothing free.”

He began walking toward the main street of the brothel district, his head bent against the wind, the raindrops cold and hard as bird shot.

T
HE SIDEWALKS WERE
empty, the gutters running fast, when she stepped out of the jitney in front of an alleyway that yawned like a ravenous mouth. Ruby heard the streetcar clang behind her, then the sound of its wheels diminishing on the tracks. The alleyway was brick-paved, channeled with runoff in the center, lined on either side with trash cans and wet paper bags splitting with garbage. At the far end was a green wood door with a rope for a handle. She began walking toward it.

Above, rainwater was sluicing off the roofs and twirling down on her head, running into her eyes. She looked over her shoulder, hoping to see someone on the sidewalk, perhaps a happy group of soldiers on pass from the army base. A vagabond stared back at her, his clothes as soaked as tissue paper. He walked away.

The door was ajar. She cupped her hand around the rope that served as a handle. “Ishmael?” she said.

The only sound she heard was a strip of gutter swinging from an eave high above. She pulled back the door, scraping it across a concrete bib. There was a glow from another door down a hallway. The interior of the room smelled of malt and mold and wood barrels.

“Ishmael?” she repeated.

As her eyes adjusted, she saw the back of a wheelchair and a figure sitting in it, wearing a tall-crowned, wide-brimmed hat, a blanket draped over the shoulders. “Oh, Ishmael,” she said, running toward the wheelchair.

The door slammed shut behind her; a man stepped out of the shadows and locked it with a steel bolt. He wore a goatee and had a triangular face and a weak mouth and hands with long fingers that made her think of an amphibian.

“You’re sure a dumb bitch,” he said.

He hit her in the middle of the face with his fist, knocking her into the wheelchair. A manikin with hinges on the arms and legs toppled from the wheelchair onto the floor. Ruby stared up at the man. He wore steel-toed boots and canvas pants and a wide belt with an antler-handled knife on it. “My name is Jessie. I’m gonna teach you how to yodel.”

She pushed herself on her hands against a barrel, her hat crooked on her head. “Where’s my son?”

“I’ll take you to him. You’re gonna have to do me a favor first. You’re gonna be a good girl. You know what being a good girl means, don’t you?” He stepped closer to her. “Don’t look at the door. There ain’t no cavalry coming. You’re in the hands of the J Boys. I’m the gentle one. You don’t want to meet Jim or Jack or Jeff. They don’t got healthy urges.”

His trouser cuffs and the tops of his boots were bluish green, smeared with a substance that looked like clay.

“Don’t hit me again,” she said.

“I wouldn’t dream of it, darlin’.”

“Help me up, please.”

“I think you’re doing fine right there.”

“When will you take me to see Ishmael?”

“Soon as we finish with the favor I mentioned.”

“It was you who wrote the note?”

“Maybe your son wrote it.”

“My son wouldn’t lure me here.”

“You cain’t tell what a man will do when his life is in danger, war hero or not.” He lowered his hand to his belt and hooked his thumb in it, his fingers hanging below the buckle. He smiled at her almost kindly.

“I don’t think I can do what you’re asking me to,” she said.

“Sure you can. You know, you’re cute when you say it like that. Come on, hon. Time’s a-wasting. Let’s get with it.”

“I hurt my back. You have to help me up. I’ll undress.”

“It’s all right if you try to buy time. They all do. But you’re not leaving here until the right things happen. That’s the way it is.”

“I understand.”

“That’s a good girl. Now get them bloomers off.”

She raised her arms to him and waited. He grasped her by the wrists and pulled her to her feet. He was grinning, his teeth like kernels of corn, his breath rife with the smells of nicotine and fish. “You’re quite the little heifer.”

She pulled the pin from her hat, gripping the glass knob tightly in her palm, and drove the point into his mouth. He gagged and tried to push her away, but she drove the point deeper, past his teeth into the cheek, scraping bone, piercing the skin behind the jaw, the glass knob wedging against the roof of his mouth.

“Where is he? Tell me where my son is,” she said, kicking his shins, flailing at his head with her fists.

Whatever he tried to say was lost in the blood clogging his throat. She leaned down to pick up a loose brick and heard him grunt as he pulled the hat pin from his mouth. She lifted the brick above her shoulder and hit him just below the eye, caving in the cheekbone.

But he wasn’t done. He ran at her with his full weight, swinging his fists, and knocked her to the floor again. A moment later, he was out the door and running down the alleyway into the storm. The manikin lay beside Ruby, its face turned toward her, as glossy and smooth and eyeless as a darning sock.

R
UBY SAT ON
the side of the bed in her hotel room and told Hackberry everything that had happened behind the door in the alleyway. When she finished, he sat beside her and put his arm over her shoulder. “You didn’t want to wait on me?” he said.

“I didn’t know when you’d be back,” she replied.

“His name was Jessie? And you’ve never seen him?”

“Would the police have a photograph of him?”

“It’s unlikely. A man like Beckman doesn’t hire known criminals. Or he brings them in from somewhere else and then gets rid of them.”

“What do we do now, Hack?”

“I see only two choices. Maybe they’re not the best, but I don’t know a third one.”

“What are they?” she asked.

Through the window, the sky seemed unrelenting in its darkness, as though neither the moon nor the sun would ever be more than a vaporous smudge.

“I want to use the telephone in my room,” he said.

“Use it here.”

“I need to have a conversation of a kind I’ve never had.”

————

B
ACK IN HIS
room, he asked the switchboard operator to dial Beatrice DeMolay’s number. She picked up the phone immediately. “Mr. Holland?”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“You want to know why I talked to you so angrily outside Arnold Beckman’s office.”

“It crossed my mind.”

“I’m entering into a business arrangement with him. You need to stay out of it,” she said.

“I think you let me down.”

“Do you, now?”

“Call it what you like, Miss B. I had a world of respect for you. What the hell are you doing?”

“What gives you the right to ask me that?”

“You’ve got a point. So I won’t. That’s not why I called, anyway. I need your man Andre.”

“Boy, if you don’t have nerve.”

“
I
have nerve? You were Ishmael’s friend. I thought you were mine, too. Maybe you have a reason for being with Beckman. But seeing you there was hard to swallow.”

“What do you want Andre for?”

“He offered to he’p me. He’s the only one.”

“Help you in what way?”

“Ask him. Or don’t. You can hang up the telephone if you like. Ishmael’s mother was attacked by one of Beckman’s men. He wanted to violate her as well, except she shoved a hat pin halfway down his throat.”

He waited and watched the rain sliding down the windows, the electricity flickering through the heavens. He wondered if the latter indicated a sign and decided it did not.