The Other Typist (26 page)

“Wait!” I said as I hurried after him. He ignored me. I stumbled forward in a scurry and caught up to him. When we got to the end of a seemingly endless labyrinth of hallways, he drew up short in front of a door.

“Dr. Spitzer’ll be in there. That’s him you’ll wanna talk to.”

With that, the redhead turned on his heel and the light from his lantern dimmed as he moved away. Confused and desperate not to be left alone in the dark in such a frighteningly unfamiliar place, I clawed for the doorknob. As soon as my hand found it, the door pushed open easily, and I was immediately blinded by a series of bright overhead lamps hanging from the ceiling in the room within. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to this new development, my brain on the verge of abandoning all expectations of normalcy.

“What in the world—?”

“Can I help you?” a man in a crisp white lab-coat asked as he approached.

“Oh! Why . . . no. No—I mean yes! Yes, please. I suppose I should explain; you see I’m . . .” I suddenly felt reluctant to give my name. “Odalie sent me,” I finished. I looked around. The room, as I have mentioned, was very brightly lit. There was a pair of very high, long tables running down the middle of the room, upon which a great number of beakers and flasks dripped and bubbled away. The air smelled strongly of rubbing alcohol and something else . . . something I couldn’t quite place but that smelled a little like formaldehyde. “What is this place?”

The man in the lab-coat frowned. “Odalie sent you?” he repeated, just as the redhead had done. “Hmm.” He looked me over. He had very dark, almost black hair, parted precisely down the middle, all of which was complemented by an equally dark, sharply trimmed mustache. As his predecessor had also been, the man in the lab-coat seemed skeptical of my connection to Odalie. Finally he shrugged. “Hmm, yes, well. Fine. I suppose that must be true enough. After all, who else would you be? We’re expecting another chemist in soon, and surely you’re not
him
. Hah! Unless . . . I don’t suppose your name happens to be Madame Curie?” He rolled his eyes at me, gave me another assessing head-to-toe look, and before I could give an answer supplied one of his own in a snippy voice. “No . . . I don’t suppose it is.”

I remained silent, still staring goggle-eyed at the multiplicity of gurgling, steaming contraptions behind him. He followed my gaze over his shoulder. He turned back to me and grunted.

“You probably don’t even know
who
she is,” he said with a sneer, and I realized he meant Madame Curie. I felt my dander go up. A sudden rush of heat went to my cheeks, and the queer mechanical feeling I sometimes experienced came over me.

“Madame Curie is the winner of two Nobel Prizes,” I said haughtily. It wasn’t as if I’d never read the headlines growing up! “Not to mention living proof that men often jump to the wrong conclusions, in more ways than one,” I added for good measure. The man in the lab-coat raised his eyebrows at me and cocked his head. Almost imperceptibly, his posture straightened. “Listen,” I said, hoping to take advantage of the footing I’d just gained in order to accomplish my task. “I’m sure you run a regular Nobel-quality operation around here. But I’ve only come to pick up a message.” He gazed at me and remained speechless for several seconds. “Odalie said there would be a message,” I prompted him.

At the renewed mention of Odalie’s name, the trance was broken and he snapped out of his stasis. “Yes, of course. Well, there’s no good news, I’m afraid.” He turned away from me to attend the beakers with a brisk, businesslike air. He began making a series of minor adjustments to the contraptions located there. “You know how the gov’ment regulators are cracking down. They’ve really laid it on thick with the methanol lately. I can’t promise any of this batch will be drinkable. Not if we don’t want another chap dying, like last time.”

“Oh! Why, you don’t mean . . . You can’t mean someone actually . . . !” I was utterly confounded.

Instantly, I could see my state of uninformed bewilderment had cost me my temporary superior footing with the man in the lab-coat. He rolled his eyes disdainfully at me, then sighed and cleared his throat. “Look Miss . . . Miss Whatever-Your-Name-Is, just tell Miss Lazare this: The batch is a bust, but I’ll try it again. My friend is a chemist in a hair tonic factory; I can try starting from some of what they use.” He thrust a bottle in my direction. “And here,” he barked. “You can give ’er this.”

I was slow to retrieve the bottle, and he shook it back and forth as if to nag me. “What is this?” I asked, and looked at the crude, unlabeled, green glass bottle.

“Proof,” Dr. Spitzer replied, “that I’m not selling a good batch out from under her.”

My fingers closed hesitantly around the bottle’s neck. I peered into the glass and squinted at its contents. As far as I could tell, they were crystal clear. I swirled the liquid around, causing Dr. Spitzer to frown.

“Don’t go drinking that now,” Dr. Spitzer warned. “You have enough common sense to know that much, doncha?”

“Why . . . yes . . .”

“Figures. Course, you look more like the pampered type; probably more used to all that fancy imported stuff.”

I blinked dumbly at him. I had never before in my life been taken for “the pampered type.” The dim realization occurred to me that Dr. Spitzer’s manners were turning increasingly rough by the second. As he looked me up and down rather uncouthly, any semblance of the imaginary university that had conferred upon him his title of “doctor” dropped away. The expression that took over his face was both wolfish and cruel at the same time.

“Yeah, I know all aboutcha: Leave it to all’a the blue-collar boys to drink the homemade stuff and let ’em try their odds, while you leave it alone.” He gave an embittered sigh and shrugged dismissively. “Well anyway, just remember to relay my message.”

I stood there, still absorbing the message to be relayed. Dr. Spitzer was irritable now, this much was plain. I felt as though I’d botched things; I’d managed to both offend him
and
prove myself a ninny. He pushed a button and somewhere an electric buzzer rang. Seconds later the redhead was standing in the doorway.

“Stan can show you the way out,” Dr. Spitzer said in a flat, dismissive tone. He resumed his work as though my presence in the room was already a distant memory. I followed Stan with the same automatic step that had led me into the building, and before I knew it I was standing outside again, the heavy wooden door shuddering to a close behind me. A clammy breeze was blowing off the river, and looming above me at some distance I could make out the peaked trestles of the Queensboro Bridge. Self-consciously, I tucked the bottle clutched in my hand under my coat. It wouldn’t do to be seen on a public street holding an unmarked bottle of alcohol.

But then I looked around and realized there was no one to see me. I had no mode of transportation; no bell-boy or doorman had telephoned for a cab to pick me up as I had nowadays all too quickly become accustomed. I began walking away from the graveled edge of the river in the direction of greater civilization. Though I had been ushered in and out of the building with great speed, the overall errand had taken longer than I’d expected. As I picked my way from the rubble-strewn industrial blocks and back into the major avenues, I gave a dismal glance at my watch and realized the ride back to the precinct would only get me there in time to turn around and go home for the day. I deliberated as I neared First Avenue, then hailed a taxi and gave the driver the apartment address instead. At least I could be fairly confident in Odalie’s ability to conceal my absence.

Later that same evening, when I relayed the message to Odalie and handed her the bottle Dr. Spitzer had given me, she did not look especially surprised.

“Oh yes, he’s a bit of a quack, Dr. Spitzer,” she said, taking the bottle with unseeing eyes and setting it absently on a nearby side table. She shook her head. “Well, I won’t hold my breath. Heaven knows why Gib hired him in the first place. Not much of a chemist in the end, I’m afraid.” I thought of what Dr. Spitzer had said about the last batch—
Not if we don
’
t want another chap dying, like last time.
 . . . As if she could detect my thoughts, Odalie ignored the abandoned bottle now sitting on the side table, turned a page in the magazine she was reading, and with a faraway look added, “There are stories about him . . . believe me.”

She didn’t need to convince me; I believed her. The catch was, though I had gone to great pains to become her most trusted confidante, I was beginning to realize there were some things I’d rather not know.

Though Odalie’s little “favors” forced me to step beyond the boundaries of my comfort, I continued to complete these occasional odd tasks, happy at least I’d finally secured the position I’d coveted for so long—that is, I had finally established myself as the most important person in Odalie’s life, and she had clearly been appointed the most important person in mine.

It is impossible to explain to someone who has never made Odalie’s acquaintance how glorious this is. It is not enough to say she had a way about her. If you were feeling heavy, she had some sort of trick to make you feel so light as to become giddy with it. If you were slighted at work, she made the person who slighted you the butt of an inside joke. When you were with Odalie, it was impossible to be an outsider. For me, this latter phenomenon was nothing short of a miracle. After all, I had been an outsider all my life.

And so, despite my growing unease with the little errands Odalie requested every now and again, I nonetheless think of those days as perhaps the happiest and most blissful time in all my life. I had reached a pinnacle. But of course, I didn’t know it. Pinnacles are only defined as such by that which surrounds them, and in this case my high point was fated to be followed by a very low point.

Little did I know, my low point was looming just out of my line of vision. I would soon unwittingly turn a corner, and there it would be.

•   •   •

I REACHED THE CORNER
in question when I caught a glimpse of a man in the holding cell whose face looked familiar. I couldn’t be sure, but thought perhaps I’d seen him at the speakeasy once or twice before. When I alerted Odalie, she appeared to recognize him immediately, and I could tell she intended to take action about the situation. As she had in previous times, she managed to get herself assigned to the case. Once Odalie and the Sergeant had taken the man into the interrogation room, he was released only minutes later. I watched him amble through the precinct and out the front door. It was as though I was seeing an echo of Gib strolling leisurely out the door on that first day after the raid. I rose from my desk and walked toward the interrogation room. At the time, I told myself I was merely curious about Odalie’s methods, but this was a lie. I see now I always knew what her methods were; I had quite simply and stubbornly blinded myself to the fact.

There was a long hallway along one side of the precinct that led to the interrogation room. Or, rather, the
INTERVIEW ROOM
, as was stenciled in brassy gold paint upon the window of the door. I turned into the hallway and immediately glimpsed Odalie and the Sergeant standing at the far end. I saw them plain enough from where I stood, but it was clear they took no notice of my presence in return. I was about to approach them when some instinct within told me not to. There’s a certain sensation you get when you blunder into two people who are sharing an intimate moment, and as I turned the corner into the hallway I had that sensation. It stopped me dead in my tracks, and I stood there, dumbstruck, looking on. They seemed deep in conversation, but they were speaking in such low voices that I was at pains to make out what they were saying. And then a very simple thing occurred that stopped my heart in my chest.

As they were talking, Odalie reached a hand to the Sergeant’s chest and idly fingered his lapel, leaning in and smiling flirtatiously as she did so. I was aghast. The Sergeant was such a painfully formal man, I expected him to immediately correct her errant behavior. But I awaited a reprimand that never came. Instead, he went on talking as though it were perfectly natural that Odalie should touch him so intimately. For a fleeting moment, I considered the possibility the Sergeant was being polite. Perhaps he meant to simply ignore Odalie’s foolishness rather than point it out and cause her the pain of embarrassment. I knew he was capable of such gallantry. But as her hand slid from his lapel and came to rest on the upper shoulder of his sleeve, I was utterly disabused of this conclusion. When the Sergeant finally reacted, time slowed down and the warmth drained from my cheeks. As I continued to look on, the Sergeant lifted his own hand to cover hers, then traveled in a friendly way down and then up along the length of her lithe, short-sleeved arm.

I had seen enough. I was trembling with rage, and the sight had instantly set the pains of nausea to twisting in my stomach. I quickly turned on my heel and scurried away in the direction of the ladies’ room, where for several minutes I retched nothing but air into an empty sink. Then I stood staring at my reflection in the mirror and, for a while, everything went black.

Later, someone would point to a series of long, spidery fissures that now run the length of the bathroom mirror and claim that I had contributed to their creation. But I cannot see how this is possible, as it only stands to reason the mirror would’ve left some mutual evidence upon my person, and I don’t recall having noticed any such scratches or cuts on my skin. In any case, when I finally reemerged from the bathroom I was still quite unsettled. My muscles quivered and quaked with an indignant sense of betrayal. Every inch of me was poised to take immediate action.

By virtue of pure disciplined effort I was able to go about my work as usual, but the scene I had witnessed haunted me for the rest of the day, flashing into my brain at inopportune times, each recollection of it more vivid than the last. Dr. Benson theorizes I have what he calls
an overactive imagination
. He says I am altogether too ready to jump to conclusions. During our sessions he lets his eyeglasses slip down until they barely have any purchase left at the tip of his nose, and peering at me from over the top of those empty flashing mirrors he often says,
Tell me, Rose, how can you be so certain there was something inappropriate going on between Odalie and the Sergeant?
Or else he will sometimes say,
How can you be sure your imagination wasn
’
t playing tricks on you?
And I take offense to the latter question, because no one has ever accused me of having too much imagination, and even if what little imagination I
do
possess was to play tricks, they certainly wouldn’t be tricks from the gutter. Once, Odalie described me as a “bluenose” to someone at a party, right in front of my face, and I wasn’t a bit mad because, after all, I do think I have an exceptionally clean mind and would never think to be ashamed of this fact.