The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (15 page)

“It’s not safe on the streets no longer,” Bessie said dolefully, setting a draft of beer on a coaster in front of me. “Some fly cop will jump out of a doorway and finger you for associating with known criminals, even though there ain’t nobody in sight but you and the cop, and drag you off to the precinct. My Joe just got back this morning after a night of incarceration in a cell with a couple of dozen truly undesirable citizens. There was no room to lie down and he couldn’t even perform his bodily functions with privacy. It’s disgraceful, what this city is coming to.”

Bessie’s boyfriend, Joe, was often spoken of by her, but was never around when we came by. His profession, it seemed, had the same hours as her own: late evening to early morning. She never discussed just what he did, but we had the impression that it involved entering business establishments in the absence of their owners in an effort to make them realize the value of burglary insurance.

“The commissioner is being a bit overenthusiastic,” Brass agreed.

“Where’d he get a moniker like ‘Valentine’ anyway?” Bessie complained. “They want to name him after a saint it should have been Dismus, who went around telling people how they was supposed to behave until he was called early to Heaven.”

The conversation gently twisted around to Two-Headed Mary. Bessie had seen the mention in “Brass Tacks,” and wanted to know whether she had turned up.

“Not yet,” Brass said. “And her disappearance gets more mysterious daily.”

Sid grunted. “Not surprising,” he said. “Mary’s never practiced doing anything the easy way. She’s a story-teller, only she don’t warn you that it’s a story you’re getting.”

“You know the lady?” Brass asked.

“Sure,” Sid said. “Known her for years. Called herself a variety of names, then more or less settled on Mary. Her real name’s Bain, Amber Bain. Only, for some reason, she don’t like nobody knowing that. Got a daughter in the show business. I used to do some rough work for the Professor—you know the Professor? Back in the old days.”

“Rough work?” I asked. “I didn’t know you did that sort of thing.”

Sid looked a question at me.

“Well,” I said, “I mean, you’re sort of light, and you don’t look that tough or imposing, which I would have thought was a requirement. No offense.”

Bessie broke out laughing. Sid chuckled. Brass looked amused. “Carpentry, a little electrical wiring, painting, rough work like that,” Sid explained. “When the Professor had a big store con going on, I’d help him set the stage. I also took photographs. If we wanted it to look like a stockbroker’s office, I’d go take photographs of a real one so we’d have something to copy—or a commercial bank, or a bookmaking joint, or a faro parlor or some such. Then, when the show started I’d take a part, usually something like the cash teller or the tote board operator.”

“Responsible positions,” Brass commented.

“Yeah. Anyway, the Professor used Mary to class up the act. She always looked and acted like a duchess. The mark couldn’t believe there was anything phony going on when Mary was in the room.”

“Back then did she ever take a few weeks off and depart for places unknown?”

“I ain’t never heard of her doing that.”

The conversation then switched around to the State of the Union, and then baseball. When we got up to leave, Sid put out his hand. “Listen,” he said. “I’ll ask around the Street for word of Mary. If there’s anything else I can do, let me know.”

“Of course,” Brass said.

Sid cocked his head sideways and stared at the ceiling, but he was seeing something else. “You know, them were the good old days,” he said. “Working with the Professor and Mary and the crew. There was like a, I don’t know, a sense of companionship.”

“Nothing encourages solidarity as when you’re gathered together to swindle some unsuspecting yahoo,” Brass said.

“Yeah,” Sid agreed. “That’s it.”

Brass tapped on the table with a finger. “Tell me, Sid,” he said, “do you know a character who’s short and thin, with a prominent nose, probably dresses flash, and who’s good with locks? Can you put a name to that picture?”

Sid pondered. “Nothing comes to mind,” he said. “But I’ll ask around. No heat?”

“Not from me. I just want to ask a gentleman of that description a few questions.”

“Right,” Sid said. “Like I said, I’ll ask around.”

We went to a couple of more joints before calling it a night. Gashouse Flo and Jennie the Factory, a couple of local ladies of the late evening, cornered Brass in a joint called the Club Boomalay and told him their woes, which sounded much like the complaints of unorganized labor everywhere. Except that in their case management came in the guise of Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz. I wondered whether Clifford Odets would like to do a play called “Waiting for the Dutchman.” The ladies’ stories were fascinating, but nothing that Brass could sanitize enough to use in his column.

At the Kit Kat Club the floor man asked about Two-Headed Mary, but the query was merely friendly and he only knew her from her occasional visits to the club, usually with one gentleman or another.

It was a little after two in the A.M. when Brass decided to call it a night. I should correct the impression you may have that Brass demands sixteen-hour days from his employees. I accompany Brass on these late-night meanderings because I am as fascinated as he is with the characters he talks to and the tales they tell. Brass likes to end the evening with a brisk walk, so we walked briskly uptown.

“I almost forgot,” Brass said as we separated at Columbus Circle, he to head east to his Central Park South penthouse apartment, I farther north to my humble room. “No need to come to the office tomorrow morning. I have another assignment for you.”

He explained.

By two-thirty I had brushed my teeth and was in bed, staring at the ceiling and considering the possibilities of tomorrow’s assignment. By two-thirty-two I was asleep.

In his youth it was clear that Sindbad, son of Lufar, was not favored of the gods. He grew thin and tall, but with a sickly cast; and he was cursed with an insatiable curiosity that always put him where he should not be. In his sixth year he fell into the Taleth in flood and traveled several leagues in the foaming torrent before being cast upon a passing rock, and thence to the shore. That he was not killed was regarded by those who knew him, not as a miracle, but as an accident which the gods would remedy as time passed.

Those of you who pick at such things, not recognizing the high caste and immense learning of even the mildest teller of tales, are even now saying: “surely you mean Basra, not Bazra; surely it was the Euphrates into which the child Sindbad was cast, not the Taleth, a river of which the geographers have no knowledge.”

And yet I tell you that it was in Bazra, a city already ancient when the Turkic Basra was founded in the seventh century as you count such things, that this tale took place, and over a thousand years before. And the Taleth still flows, although today a meeker river and bearing a different name.

In his ninth year…

The reason that I have never gotten past page sixty in any of my earnest attempts to write the Great American Novel is not that the writing or plotting was bad. It may have been bad, but this was not the reason. I have learned from those who know such things that it is well nigh impossible for a writer to judge his own works. Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes so he could get on with his more serious writing. Shakespeare probably thought that
Timon of Athens
or
Troilus and Cressida
was his greatest work, and
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
merely potboilers that gave his actors jobs, but wouldn’t last.

The reason that I have never gotten past page sixty in any of my attempts so far is that I keep trying to follow my muse, and my muse can’t seem to make up her mind. There was the small-town novel; I’d tried one of those, “Colonel Sebastian and the Gazebo,” but even though I grew up in a small town I couldn’t think of that much worth saying about one. I’d gotten pretty far into “Fools and Comrades,” my war novel, before I realized that I was avoiding the war scenes because I knew nothing whatever about war beyond what I’ve read in the pulps. “The Supplicant,” my realistic novel, was mystical; and “Heavy Hangs the Head,” my story of the common man, had somehow turned into a Marxist, or at least Fabian Socialist, polemic. And I am neither.

So I’ve decided to switch to fantasy. It should be easier, right? I mean, you just make up the stuff, right? You get to use this great-sounding language, and sneak in all sorts of references to contemporary problems without having to solve them or even fully understand them; and you sound knowledgeable if not wise. A piece of cake.

So what happened to Sindbad in his ninth year that you or I or anybody else should care about?

Maybe I should try science fiction. “Zed Blox and his Galactic Rangers” or “The Princes of Earth” or “The Stars Like Popcorn”; E. E. “Doc” Smith and John W Campbell Jr. make it look easy. But then all writing looks easy until you roll that blank sheet of paper into the typewriter.

I rolled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter and put it in the little box that holds the uncompleted manuscript I happen to be working on, and put the cover on the typewriter. It was ten o’clock on a blustery morning; time for me to go to work. I buttoned my vest and shrugged into my jacket. Given the assignment, I was wearing one of my gentleman’s disguises. My outfit today was a double-breasted number in blue with a chalk stripe and the new lapel that sweeps to the lower button. The salesman at Rogers Peet was very enthusiastic about it when I bought it, needing a suitable uniform to interview some local tycoons a few months back. Gloria thought it looked elegant; I thought it made me look like either a banker or a gangster: white shirt and dark tie, banker; blue shirt and loud tie, gangster.

Today I wore a white button-down shirt and a regimental tie given to me by Garrett for my birthday. I wasn’t sure what regiment, but knowing Garrett I would have bet on something like His Majesty’s Eleventh Corps de Balloon or the Ninth Imperial Light Camel.

Into the topcoat, on with the homburg, and out the door. The program was simple in outline, but might be difficult to accomplish. I was to pick up Sandra Lelane and go with her to the apartment building that Pearly Gates was convinced his missing wife had inhabited. We were then to somehow gain entrance to the apartment and see what we could see. It was the “gain entrance” part that might be tricky. Since the staff of the building apparently knew Two-Headed Mary as Phillippa Gates, nee Stern, and was unaware that she had a daughter, we had no handle to use and would have to improvise as the occasion demanded. I hailed a passing Checker cab and got in. “Seventy-seventh and Central Park West,” I told the driver, a wiry bald man whose name, according to his license posted by the meter, was Thomas Jefferson Finkle.

He turned to look at me. “It’s maybe four blocks. For four blocks it isn’t worth dropping the flag. You could walk it easier,” he said. “You could use the exercise. You wouldn’t even work up a sweat.”

“I’m a big tipper,” I told him.

“Sure,” he said. “You tip what? Maybe twenty percent? On a fifteen-cent ride that’s three cents. I’m excited.”

“We’re going on from there,” I told him.

“What, another four blocks?” he growled, unconvinced, slid the panel closed and flipped the meter on.

It was just ten-thirty when we pulled up, and Miss Lelane was waiting outside her building. New York is a blase city, whose citizens are too world-weary and nonchalant to pause and stare at the famous or notorious who pass among them, so only two or three people had paused to stare at Sandra Lelane. But they had an excuse; wearing a camel-hair coat and a felt hat that looked like a sort of flattened-out miniature fedora, she was sedately beautiful and well worth staring at. She made me feel lightheaded and poetic. I opened the door for her. “Small is the worth,” I recited,

“Of beauty from the light retired

Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

“Well,” she said, seating herself and closing the door. “And so early in the morning, too. Is it Andrew Marvell?”

I shook my head. “No, but you’ve got the right period. Edmund Waller.”

She nodded. “Did you enjoy the play?” she asked.

“The—oh, you mean
Fine and Dandy.
I loved it. And I loved you in it.” I had conversed with actors and actresses before, and I knew what she wanted to hear. Luckily in this case it was strictly true.

I leaned forward and tapped on the glass panel. “Eightieth and Park, this time. Go through the park.”

He twisted around to face us and opened the panel. “And how else would I go?”

“I don’t know. You might have decided to go around. For the exercise.”

“I got a weak heart,” he told me. He slid the panel closed and pulled away from the curb.

I leaned back in my seat and smiled at Sandra to show her it was all in fun.

Sandra looked at me thoughtfully. “Your boss is a strange man,” she said.

“You won’t get any argument from me,” I told her. “But to just which of his strangenesses are you alluding?”

“I had a talk with Vera about him. You know—Vera Dain.”

“The actress,” I said brightly in a masterly understatement; sort of like referring to Lindbergh as “the pilot” or Dutch Schultz as “the crook.”

Sandra smiled. “That’s right. That one. She went around with Brass for a couple of years.”

“That was before my time,” I said.

“According to Vera, he doesn’t like publicity.”

“True.”

“But he’s a columnist! Damon Runyon loves publicity. Winchell creates his own!”

“True,” I said.

“He wouldn’t take her to the Stork or to Twenty-One. He would only take her to places where he wouldn’t be recognized. He took her to places that were so obscure that they didn’t even recognize
her
.”

“When the boss goes to places like the Stork Club, he’s working,” I told her.