The Other Typist (19 page)

I suppose I should have been happy to see it, and it should have been cause for celebration. There was one moment, one moment I remember ever so clearly, when Redmond was released (no thanks to my own efforts), and he walked by my desk and looked me in the eye with a scowl on his face that said,
Thank you but no thank you, Miss Rose—oh, I see how far you’d go for your “friends,”
and I felt a small tremor of relief wash over me that Odalie had been successful in setting these men free. I felt truly bad about Redmond. The last exchange we’d had was my drink order, and then I’d gone and disappeared right before the raid, leaving him to his own devices. And I’d only very narrowly missed being pinched by the police myself, and if I’d been nabbed I’m certain desperation for my own freedom would’ve overcome any moral high ground I can possibly claim. When I saw Redmond released, I felt glad for a moment, and considered that perhaps what Odalie was doing wasn’t so bad after all.

•   •   •

LATER THAT EVENING,
with the events of the workday finally behind us, we took a taxi back to the apartment. Since moving in with Odalie, I hadn’t so much as set foot in a subway car. We always took taxi-cabs to and from work. I thought of this now and realized the image of the many subway platforms I had previously haunted lingered only faintly in my memory, and it was as though I had dreamed them. I stared thoughtfully out the taxi window as we rolled along the Manhattan streets and worked up my nerve to ask Odalie what she had told the Sergeant to secure the men’s releases.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You know. I mean, what was the line? It must’ve been something quite sturdy; the Sergeant is not an easy man to convince.”

Odalie turned her head from the window and regarded me carefully. I had never directly questioned her about the stories she told; my pulse quickened as I worried I had perhaps just violated the pact of complicity between us. But Odalie’s response surprised me. “Rose,” she said, “you put altogether too much faith in the Sergeant. You really oughtn’t.” She returned her gaze to the skyscrapers rolling steadily by. “You’d do better to remember, my dear, he’s only a man,” she murmured somewhat distractedly.

I did not question her further on the subject, but Odalie’s enigmatic statement plagued me for the rest of the evening. An uneasy feeling descended upon me every time I tried to puzzle out what Odalie had meant about the Sergeant. I became resolved not to think on it, but I was only somewhat successful in this resolution, as it remained niggling at the back of my brain. You see, doubt is a magnificently difficult pest of which to try and rid oneself, and is worse than any other kind of infestation. It can creep in quietly and through the tiniest of cracks, and once inside, it is almost impossible to ever completely remove.

After dinner, I spent the evening alone in my room attempting to distract myself by reading books and listening to the phonograph. Five Mozart records and nine chapters of
The Scarlet Letter
later, my mind was no closer to peace. With a sigh, I switched off the electric lamp and crawled into bed. It was past midnight and I was tired, but exhaustion had crept too far into my bones, and now sleep was reluctant to come. I grew frustrated. I’d always had the gift of falling asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, and sleep was one of the very sweet reliefs I’d come to count upon. In fact, there were only two times I could recall having difficulty falling asleep during all my years at the orphanage. Both times, Adele had sensed my frustration and kept a vigil with me, keeping me occupied with fairy stories in an attempt to induce drowsiness. Once, she’d even snuck into the kitchen and warmed up a lovely concoction of milk, cinnamon, and nutmeg for me to drink down.

Remembering this, I thought of the sizable and well-appointed kitchen in our apartment and how generously stocked it always was (Odalie had a standing order that fresh groceries be delivered every third day). Very likely, I might find all the ingredients I needed to re-create Adele’s soothing cure—milk, cinnamon, nutmeg. I slid my feet into my slippers and padded toward the kitchen. But as I crossed the apartment and turned into the kitchen, I discovered the light was already on, and somebody was already in there.

“Oh!” said Odalie. “Well, fancy meeting you here.” She was dressed in a creamy off-white satin robe. The way she wore it, it looked more like an evening gown than a robe. I observed the manner in which it hugged her body in some places and strategically draped in others. She gave a girlish little laugh and took my hand in hers as if we had just bumped into each other in a busy uptown restaurant. As her tanned wrists emerged from her sleeves, I noticed she was wearing the diamond bracelets again. It was curious to me; I wondered what mysterious urge had prompted her to slip them on. “Sandman hasn’t come to fetch you for a date yet?”

I gave a skeptical grunt. “It appears I’ve been stood up,” I said in a dry voice, volleying back the metaphor. “You, too?”

“Yes. But I have just the thing!” I sank into a kitchen chair and looked to where she stood at the stove. Something seemed incongruous, and as I blinked my weary eyes I realized I had never before seen Odalie standing in front of any kitchen appliance, let alone one in active operation. The aroma of cinnamon hit my nose and I started, surprised to smell a version of the very concoction I had come into the kitchen planning to make. “Trust me, this is divine,” she said as she poured the contents of a saucepan into two mugs. She put one in front of me, where a snail’s trail of stream curled upward to my nostrils.

“Careful, it’s hot,” she said unnecessarily as I lifted the mug. I blew across the lip of it to show her my willingness to be patient. She slipped into the kitchen chair across from me. My eyes took stock of her as we waited for our bedtime toddies to cool. She looked quite composed, even at such an ungodly hour. Her complexion was tanned and smooth, her inky black bob as shiny as if it had been freshly brushed. I had never noticed the fundamental disproportion of her features before: Her eyes were quite large, her mouth was quite small, and everything clustered toward the center of her face, as if all were bound eventually for the tidy rosebud shape of her lips. I felt a shiver of admiration, laced—as most admiration tends to be—with a tiny hint of envy. And then my eyes fell upon her wrists again.

“They’re quite something, aren’t they?” she said, catching me looking at the bracelets. They were indeed. I nodded. For a fleeting second I thought to ask her about the fiancé who had given them to her, the one she’d mentioned in passing to the Lieutenant Detective. But before the question made its way from my brain to my lips, Odalie spoke up of her own accord. “We were given them, my sister and I,” she said, pushing the bracelet on her left wrist around with an idle finger. I stared at her incredulously. Slowly, my mind began to absorb the fact that my eavesdropping had gone undetected. Odalie did not think for a second I’d heard what she’d told the Lieutenant Detective, this much was clear. She had no plans to tell me the story of acquiring the bracelets as an engagement present. She sighed and continued.

“It was our legacy. My father gave one to me, and one to my sister,” she explained. As she pronounced the word
sister,
a very theatrical and forlorn expression came over her face. I stifled an indignant snort. Surely she was joking, I thought. I had seen just such an expression on Helen’s face many times, albeit with a much more amateurish execution. But she sighed again and I realized this was no practical joke. “He was something of a gambler, I suppose. Made a lot of money in steel, but then lost it all on the railroads.” I felt for a fleeting second I was reading the latest headline in the
Times
. “He died when we were still very young,” she said, her face solemn as the grave itself, “and left us only these—one for each of us. We wore them everywhere. It was as though they twinned us. We made all sorts of dramatic oaths to each other that we would never take them off.” She laid a finger over the swath of diamonds twinkling around her wrist. “Of course, he also left us with his debt,” she said, and smiled bitterly with that sort of tenacious, impecunious glee that suggests the bearer has known far more long nights and lean days than you have. “Her name was Violet,” Odalie said. “And she was sweet and lovely, just like the very flower of her name.” She pondered the meaning of this sentence, as though it was only just now washing over her anew. “Oh—like you!” she said, feigning sudden realization of the floral-themed similarity of my name. And then Odalie became quite serious. The corners of her mouth turned downward, something I’d never seen them do. It was a very unnatural pose for her features. “Violet took great care of me, made many sacrifices.”

Her calculation was deliberate, and very precise. When she made statements like this, it left her listener to wonder what those sacrifices were, and to assume the worst. It was as though a shaft of heavenly light descended to illuminate the momentary apparition that was Odalie’s imaginary saint of a sister. The long, plaintive notes of a string instrument would’ve completed the picture.

“You know, I have always felt the love of women was much truer than the love of men,” she said, looking directly into my eyes. “Do you know what I mean?” I gave a polite nod. As she took a breath, her gaze flicked to my face, and she looked at me as though some sharp memory now pained her. “When she died, Violet handed over her bracelet and told me to wear one on each wrist and to think of us as paired for always and forever. Even when I had scraped lower than I’d ever thought I could go, I never gave more than a fleeting thought to selling these,” she concluded, her chest heaving as though she had just swum in from some far-flung shore. Suddenly I wanted to laugh, to roll my eyes, to poke fun at this ridiculous creature sitting before me at that very minute. But I didn’t ask the obvious question: Why, if her sister was dying and yet so precious to Odalie, didn’t it make more sense to sell the bracelets and do what was necessary to ensure her sister’s continued well-being? Instead, I bit my lip and proceeded to blow on the tiny rippling lake that was the surface of the liquid in my mug. Still debating whether or not to voice my disbelief, I took a sip. An abrupt jolt of pleasure overcame me.

“Oh,” I exclaimed. “Why, that
is
good!”

“It should be. I used condensed milk to sweeten it,” she reported, and smiled at me as though her tragic monologue had been abruptly forgotten. “You see, Rose, you and I, we’re like sisters now,” Odalie continued in a low purr. Before I had a chance to respond to this, she continued. “I know how right it was for you to do what you did about the Vitalli case; you only did what a righteous person is called to do. I think you’re very brave for it. I really do. I admire you! And something else about sisters.” She paused and smiled sweetly at me. “Sisters keep each other’s secrets. I’m sure when the time comes, you’ll keep mine.”

There was something chilling in her voice as she pronounced this last statement. For a moment I had a flash of myself as the man who decides to paint the floor of his house and somehow manages to paint himself into a corner.

“Oh, but don’t look so serious over it!” Odalie exclaimed. “All I mean to say is that I have come to think of you as my truest friend. My
dearest
and most
intimate
friend in all the world.” She reached across the table and gave my shoulder a squeeze. “I’m so glad we found each other, Rose. It feels as though we’ve always belonged together.” She reached to her right wrist and unclasped one bracelet. “Here,” she said, taking my hand in hers. I had a moment of shyness, as I was aware of my palms being cold and sweaty while hers were warm and smooth. Before I could protest, she had slipped the bracelet around my wrist and was doing up the clasp. “Here—to prove to you how much I mean it.”

I looked down at the treasure glittering on my wrist in disbelief. The diamonds caught the dim glow of the electric bulb overhead, releasing a million tiny prisms from even the smallest morsel of light. A hundred tiny stars winked up at me, as if the Milky Way itself had come to rest around my wrist.

In all my life, no one had ever given me a gift quite so nice. To be honest, I’d never even seen a piece of jewelry of that caliber close-up, let alone wrapped around my own wrist. The brooch that was tucked in my desk drawer at the precinct was also very lovely, but that didn’t really count—Odalie had dropped it and I still meant to give it back to her eventually. Unlike the brooch, which I had merely found, or her clothes, which I only borrowed, here was something she was
giving
to me. I was dizzy with the thought of it. My lips fluttered silently as I tried to thank her. Seeing my condition, Odalie laughed, the sound of it rippling through the kitchen in a musical wave. We sat there, holding hands and comparing our matching wrists, all the while grinning stupidly at each other with maniacal glee. I looked into Odalie’s smile and felt myself momentarily swallowed up by some sort of euphoric abyss.

It was moments like this, I would later learn, that would ultimately undo me.

A
ll at once it got hot, and suddenly the only thing anyone in Manhattan could talk about was the weather.
Hot enough for you?
O’Neill and Harley said with a long whistle every time they came back into the office after walking a patrol beat.
Boy oh boy, could it get any hotter?
Upper lips glistened with sweat. Cheeks and noses glowed scarlet with permanent sun-burn. Outside, the sidewalks were empty, and the few remaining pedestrians (presumably either brave or daft) dashed from one tiny patch of shade to the next. Even the precinct, usually a dank, cool cave in the summertime, sweltered with the steamy heat. There was no escaping it. Which was not to say we didn’t try to by any means possible. Feeling magnanimous and perhaps a little desperate himself, the Sergeant used some of his own money to buy a couple of electric fans, and the Lieutenant Detective spent the better part of an afternoon bolting them to the walls so they might cool our necks and faces.

“Are you able to catch a breeze with it like this?” the Lieutenant Detective asked, angling a fan in my direction and preparing to screw a hinge into place. The black wire cage faced toward me like some sort of dark mechanical flower, and suddenly the little hairs that had come loose from my chignon lifted to tickle my neck and shoulders. Papers fluttered on my desk, coming to life like a tree ferociously shaking its many leaves in the breeze. I rushed to anchor everything down and glanced over at Odalie, Marie, and Iris, all of whom were momentarily lost in their work. The papers on their desks remained at rest; it appeared my desk alone was receiving the benefit of this man-made vortex.

“I don’t need any favors,” I said.

“You don’t ever need any anything.” He winked and twisted the screw down on the hinge. Despite the breeze, suddenly the room grew even hotter—I felt a very sudden, heavy flush rise up to my ears. I rose without replying and went to the ladies’ room to splash some water on my face.

Of course, the water from the taps was not cold or refreshing in the least, the pipes being too warm that day. But I cupped my hands and splashed some tepid water on my face anyway, letting it run down my neck and chin. It was difficult to discern where my skin left off and the droplets began. Everything was seething with a pulsing heat, my perspiration and the water felt so similar in temperature. As I stood dripping over the sink, Odalie came in. She crossed her arms and sighed.

“Do you know what we need?” she asked rhetorically. I silently prayed the diagnosis was going to be a movie in one of the famously air-cooled theaters in the East 50s. The line of her petite mouth curled at the corners in that signature way she had, and her eyes darted about the empty space just over my head. I could tell she was coming up with more elaborate calculations than a movie theater. “We need a little holiday . . . somewhere with an ocean breeze. I’ll get us invited someplace nice. . . .”

I blinked. It was as if she had just spoken Chinese. I had never had a proper vacation. I took exactly three days off per year, and usually spent them at home with a stack of novels that would have never met with the approval of the nuns who’d monitored my reading habits throughout my childhood.

“But . . . what about work? How will we manage it with the Sergeant?”

“Oh,
pfft
,” she said, throwing a dismissive hand back at the wrist. “Let me worry about him. I can manage that part. He’s a pussycat, really.” The way she pronounced the word
pussycat
proved rather unsettling to me. There was something almost obscene in the inflection. The doubt I had tried so hard to banish seeped back in, and my mind drifted to the day after the raid. But I could feel Odalie’s eyes on my face, waiting for an answer now. I pushed my suspicions aside and forced a smile.

“A holiday would be nice . . . if we could manage it.”

I had used the word
we,
but I didn’t really mean it. I knew Odalie would be the one to manage everything, and she did. In record speed, too. By Friday we had been granted a week’s vacation, and found ourselves riding across the Queensboro Bridge in a coupe driven by an accommodating Wall Street man who was so painfully short, he put me in mind of Redmond. It was a wonder his feet could reach the pedals of the automobile. As a matter of fact, perhaps he could only reach the accelerator; I don’t think I can recall him using the brake at all, and we flew along at top velocity toward the broad white beaches of Long Island.

“So tell me more about what these squires do for you on the trading floor,” Odalie was saying to the broker in an enraptured voice as he sped us along the highway.

“Squads.”

“Oh, yes, I mean what these
squads
do for you on the trading floor . . . It’s so fascinating, so
very
fascinating . . . I don’t know how you stand all the excitement of it!” With every question she asked the broker she sounded more and more like she was so utterly intrigued, she was on the verge of taking up the profession herself. Of course, by then, I had come to know her better.

Nonetheless . . . just like that, we had escaped! With each mile we put behind us, I felt the air grow lighter in my lungs. It was as if the city had been one large pressure cooker, simmering in its own juices. With the top down on the coupe and a stalwart, man-made breeze blowing steadily in my face, I tallied the city’s many summertime brutalities: the heat that radiated from the gray asphalt and made the air dance in wavy shimmers; the stagnant ponds in Central Park that turned a milky, putrid, almost phosphorescent green and incubated countless mosquitoes; the blasts of hot dirty air that breathed upward from every subway grate; oh, and how the loud noises pouring from construction sites even somehow seemed to further agitate and heat the air! Why on Earth we modern humans had signed a pact to live like that was beyond my comprehension.

After pulling off the main roadway and driving through a handful of seaside hamlets, the Wall Street broker finally proved the brake pedal was equally within his reach, applying it rather harshly as we turned into the long drive of a very large house. Oyster shells scattered and crunched as the coupe’s tires rolled over the gravel. Parked automobiles were lined up, nose to tail, all along both sides of the drive. A few parked limousines still contained their hot, sweaty-faced drivers, and here and there from the interior of their front seats the flutter of an open newspaper could be discerned.

We rolled along toward a fountain at the top of the drive. The broker made one circle of it and, unable to locate anything more accommodating, found a very tight spot alongside some shrubbery that could have only deviated a hair’s breadth from the exact measurement of his coupe. After much finagling that caused him to grunt and pant at the wheel, our impromptu chauffeur was able to wedge the coupe into position and cut the motor. The moment the engine fell silent, strains of music and laughter could be heard from somewhere out behind the house. There was, I surmised, some sort of garden party going on.

“Perfect timing! A minute more and all that driving would’ve driven me absolutely mad,” Odalie announced. She reached an automatic hand to her hat to make some sort of invisible adjustment to the sporty cloche that had somehow managed to stay perfectly in place throughout the duration of our ride. I looked about to see where
here
was.

The house itself was a rather imposing two-story Dutch colonial, with deeply sloping gables. Perched on the highest level of the house was a small imitation of a lighthouse encircled by a widow’s walk that together made up a sort of third story. The whole house was so brilliantly white and incredibly pristine, I had the brief hallucination I could smell the odor of drying paint. Even though no one came out to greet us, the front door was thrown open, and it was clear further guests were expected. Gazing into the dark cavernous space of the house, I could see all the way through it and out a back door, which had likewise been thrown open and acted as a frame for a bright patch of green lawn and a glittering smudge of blue sea. I turned to point it out, but Odalie was already walking a small way ahead of me. As soon as she alighted from the coupe, she had begun to move in the direction of the house’s open door.

“Thanks so much for the lift, Edwin.”

“Would you like to get your things out of the trunk?” Edwin inquired. He was still bubbling with self-important glee, having spent the duration of the car ride basking in Odalie’s attention.

“Oh, not just now,” she answered dismissively. A bit of puff went out of Edwin’s proud pneumatic chest. “We’ll have them send someone out to collect them later, once we’ve been . . . received.”

A funny feeling came over me as Odalie made this last remark, and I began to wonder if we had been formally invited, or—a small trickle of dread came over me as the thought occurred to me—whether we were in fact that most gauche of all parasites:
gate-crashers
. Edwin stalked about, fussing with the car, realizing his passengers very clearly intended to go on ahead and leave him behind, and evidently deeply irritated by this development. “How’ll I find you for later?” he asked in a gruff manner.

“Oh,” Odalie murmured. “We’ll find you. I’m clever at finding people at parties.” This last statement was true enough, although I doubted she would prove her powers by using them to locate Edwin. He seemed equally dubious about his odds and shot her an overt scowl. Odalie tossed her head so that her shiny black bob swung in the sunlight and, with a giggle, made a halfhearted attempt at humor. “And if all else fails I’ll hire a poodle and we’ll have a hunting party and send up flares.” She gave a nervous laugh and linked her arm through mine, whereupon I felt myself urgently propelled in the direction of the open door, and Edwin’s grumbling gave way to the din of the party.

All morning the sun had been beating down on us as we rode along with the top down on the coupe. It took my eyes several moments to adjust to the dim light inside the house, and I shuffled in close step behind Odalie, instinctually following her as she navigated in and among the many dark shapes in the room. It was, I must say, a very elegant party in contrast to the rabble of the speakeasies to which I’d grown accustomed. We came near a grand piano, where instead of a drunk woman playing “Chopsticks” with her toes a hired pianist sat playing a very polished Debussy tune. Gilded mirrors hung on many of the walls, their opulence set off by the rich blue and gold of the brocade wallpaper. Oriental vases adorned with very clean-looking navy and white floral patterns lined the mantel. Trays of champagne glasses floated over waiters’ heads like golden clouds drifting in and out of formation. Even the accents embedded in the partygoers’ voices seemed to differ from those I’d encountered in the speakeasies; here the consonants of conversation were squared off with a stiff jaw while the vowels were inflected with a continental lilt.

I did not recognize a single face, certainly none from Odalie’s usual scene in the city, to be sure. The women in the room had an air of polished athletic health about them, their tanned arms suggestive of days spent walking the golf course, their hair either clipped short or else very tidily swept up off their long, lean necks. The men were dapperly dressed in morning suits or more sportily dressed in polo shirts and smartly tailored knickers with their socks pulled up high. The collection of people that had been gathered together was so well-groomed, I suddenly felt a bit shabby and unkempt, even though I had on a very expensive dress Odalie had insisted upon loaning me.

“Don’t start that,” Odalie said, swatting my hands when she noticed my fidgeting.

“Who are we here to see again?”

“The Brinkleys, of course. Max and Vera.”
Mr. and Mrs. Maximillian and Vera Brinkley.
The names rang a bell, but I was not comforted by this fact, as I quickly realized why. Maximillian and Vera Brinkley were socialites whose engagements and activities were regularly reported in the newspapers, along with their photographs. My earlier apprehension about being gate-crashers returned, and I had a sudden, panicky feeling about our mission there. I froze in my tracks and reached for Odalie’s arm.

“Odalie . . . are you acquainted with the Brinkleys? Were we invited here?”

She shrugged, twisted open the clasps of her handbag, and proceeded to extract an envelope from its depths. She waved it absently in front of my face. “I have a letter of introduction. It’s more or less like an invitation.”

I was taken aback. My eyes goggled in the direction of the letter, but Odalie took little notice. She wasn’t looking at me. Instead, her eyes searched the crowd, her head pivoting on her neck with the automatic, mechanical intensity of a submarine periscope. No doubt she was taking an inventory of partygoers recognizable for their appearances in the society pages. She seemed uncharacteristically jumpy, and I wondered if she had finally gotten us in over our heads. I pointed at the letter still clutched in her hand. I tried to think of who she might know with a great deal of adequately “old” money or else a sizable store of social influence.

“Is that . . . from the Hungarian?”

“The who?” she asked with an air of distraction, still scanning the room. She drifted through the main house and toward the backyard. I followed.

“The Hungarian. Or . . . should I call him your uncle?”

She suddenly stopped cold. Her eyebrows knit together, and she turned to fix me in her stare with something that resembled a flash of anger. I held my breath. But just as quickly as the flash of anger had sprung to her face, it melted away. Her shoulders relaxed with a shrug, and she tossed her head to let out a peal of haughty laughter.

“Oh, dear, dear, silly darling! You must have been chatting it up with Gib lately.” She patted my hand and rolled her eyes. I felt supremely foolish as I began to comprehend the extent of my own gullibility. My mental picture of the barrel-chested Hungarian with his aristocratic background and monarchist sympathies began to evaporate as we proceeded to step out the back door and into the blinding, merciless light of the midday sun.