The Secret Life of Anna Blanc (4 page)

The Venice police station was a multistory brick building with arched windows, a flag, and a certain modest grandeur. Anna approached on the arm of a limping man, whose face was as pretty and red as a monkey's bottom—Officer Carmine.

Anna shouldn't have talked back. But he had snatched the cigarette right out of her fingers and accused her of public indecency when no part of her was indecent—except maybe some parts, in which case all women were indecent. Anna huffed to herself. And isn't that why she'd been arrested, because she had female parts? That and because she had kicked him in the shin.

A police mount tied to a post shook its wiry mane and whinnied. Anna reached out to stroke its shiny coat, but Officer Carmine tugged her away. Anna scowled. “The chief of police won't be happy you arrested me.” Carmine scowled back.

As they passed through the station doors, Anna couldn't help but feel exhilarated. She had never been inside a police station, and her books said virtually nothing about them. She imagined criminals with close, beady eyes and large, sloping foreheads housed in rusty jail cells, and detectives with guns strapped in holsters, pacing paths in the tile.

Trailing behind, Eve was less exhilarated. She walked through the doors with the stoicism of Wendy Bird tied to Captain Hook's mast, two little Lost Boys at her side. If Eve was Wendy Darling, Anna was Alice in Wonderland, marveling as she stepped into a fantastical new world. It was the dingiest place she had ever seen, and she adored it. The air was smoky from an endless chain of cigarettes smoldering in ashtrays. Lights hung from wires above old desks. Their glow mixed with
sunbeams to illuminate the haze. The light barely reached the line of cells along the side, so that she could not see the back wall. They looked like caverns calling out for exploration.

There were indeed prisoners—some with beady eyes and some without, including seven boisterous suffragettes from the food fight. The women rattled the bars of their cage, singing, “Boys will be boys, and boys have had their day; Boy-mischief and boy-carelessness and noise…” Anna recognized Paul Revere, who had given her the pamphlet and had bravely taken a tomato in the kisser.

Eve's escort, an Officer Glade, had a twinkle in his eye. He grabbed Anna by the elbow and guided both women toward a clerk behind a counter that shone from the oily touch of a thousand criminal hands. Officer Glade nodded toward Anna and grinned. “Watch out. She's a hellcat.” He parodied Officer Carmine's swagger. “Women don't smoke on my beat.” His voice went high in an imitation of Anna. “But Officer, I am smoking on your beat.” He threw back his head and laughed. Eve bristled.

Anna and Eve gave their names to the clerk and Glade herded his captives into a cell with the other suffragettes, who by now were beginning to smell like a compost pile. The door locked with a clink. Anna wanted to inspect every part of her prison cell—the obscenities carved in the walls, the suspicious brown stains on the cement floor, the splintery hard benches—but the cell was crowded with criminal ladies slimed with garden waste, and Anna didn't want to risk touching them. She stayed close to Eve, who looked mad. The twins took turns clanking on the cell bars with a clamshell. Anna gazed longingly through the bars at a man in plainclothes who she imagined was a detective but was probably a clerk. “I've always wanted to see the inside of a police station.”

“What do you know? Dreams do come true,” Eve said.

Her tone was snarky. Anna chose to overlook it, as she'd just gotten Eve's children arrested. “No, they don't.”

Eve cocked her head, as if curious that this privileged girl could be so disillusioned. “What's your dream, then?”

“I'd like to trap criminals, like the spinster in
The Circular Staircase
, but it's probably against the law, because of my female parts.”

Eve crinkled her forehead.

Anna continued. “So, since that's impossible, I'd like to get married. And that's also impossible…unless my father eats bad fish or something.”

“You know, marriage is not as blissful as people make it out to be.”

“In my experience that's positively true, but there's not much else, is there?”

“You could be a school teacher,” Eve said.

Anna didn't like children. Her greatest fear was that her prayers would get crossed with some other Catholic's. Anna would get pregnant without even asking, and some other woman would get a motorcycle or permission to play flag football. Anna never prayed if there was a married lady anywhere near her in the pews.

Anna puckered her face. “I suppose I could become a nun.”

Eve smirked. “I work at a police station.”

Anna's gray eyes widened. She blinked her feathered lashes. “That's taffy! Women can't work in police stations. It's indecent.” She wanted very much to believe they could.

“Mostly I do social work, care for any women prisoners, interview female victims or suspects that are real sensitive, things like that. Central Station's a lot bigger than this station, so there's plenty to do.”

Anna's eyes glazed dreamily. “You are so…” Her voice cracked. “Fortunate.”

Eve rubbed her temple as if she had a headache. “If you were married and had more sense…”

“Is that the requirement—to be married?”

“One of them. You're supposed to have experience working with the poor. Me, I knew somebody. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had a prayer. There aren't many positions.”

Anna shook her head vigorously, as if to shake the thought right out. “I shouldn't entertain the idea. I'm not at liberty to apply. But, do you think the captain would give me a tour of the station?”

“Of course not. You're a prisoner.”

At the back of the cell, two old vegetables held up a curtain for
Paul Revere, who was peeing into a potty. Anna crossed her legs. “I have to go, but I'd burst before peeing in the cell. Do think there's a privy in the back?”

“Yep, but it's not for you.”

Anna scanned the station. Next to a windowed office, she saw a door that led to the back of the building.

A clerk strode up to the cell and straightened his tie. He addressed Eve through the bars. “Mrs. McBride, who do we call to collect your children? Can your husband care for them until your legal issues are resolved?”

“My husband's dead.” Eve pressed her lips together. “At least he better be.”

Carmine slunk up to the cell and positioned himself before Anna. He cleared his throat and recited. “I'm very sorry, Miss Blanc. It was all my fault. Why don't you wait in the captain's office while we call your father.” He gritted his teeth and grimaced. The captain watched, frowning from the station floor. It seemed that Carmine was in as much trouble as she was.

Anna flashed a victory smile at Eve, but Eve didn't notice. She had her back turned to Anna and was speaking to the clerk in whispers. “We have no living relations.”

Anna's smile dimmed. She spoke to Eve's shoulder. “Thank you for saving me.”

Eve turned and looked blankly at Anna, then turned back to the clerk. The cell creaked open and Anna took her freedom. Surely someone would come for Eve.

Carmine locked the door with one of the keys from a large brass ring. “Please follow me, Miss Blanc.”

As she glided across the main room, Anna smiled sweetly. “May I have a tour of the station, Officer?”

Carmine's nostrils flared, but he didn't speak. He ushered Anna into the captain's office, left without a
bon voyage
, and forced the door closed behind him. It stuck on the frame and slammed into place with a whack.

While a guided tour of the station was not possible at that time, a self-guided tour of the captain's office seemed a satisfying alternative. Anna rifled through the papers on the desktop, which proved to be dull and bureaucratic—a petition signed by dozens of officers protesting wool uniforms in summer; a grocery list in a woman's hand—
manteca
,
bistec
,
tomate
; and an anonymous note about who had stolen a certain goat. Anna rattled each drawer in turn, finding them all to be locked. She tried to pick the locks with her hat-pin, but the tip broke off.

She flipped through books on a shelf behind the desk and found a police procedural manual. Turning her back to the door and undoing her blouse, she sucked in her stomach and squeezed it down her corset. She stuffed two more small law enforcement books down her bodice and draped her shawl around the bulges.

Anna heard squabbling on the station floor. She cracked open the door and stuck out her head in time to see Paul Revere pitch the potty at Carmine. A tense hush fell over the station. Tinkle trickled down his uniform. The faces of prisoners and staff alike shone with silent glee at the dripping man who couldn't believe just how bad his day had become.

Glade laughed into the silence—a booming, “Ho, ho, ho.”

To Anna, the potty fight was a coup. She slipped out of the captain's office and through an adjacent door. She would take her own tour, perhaps find the bathroom, and be back in the office before her father came to bail her out. He wasn't due home from his trip until tonight. It could be morning before he collected her; at least she hoped so. She preferred to delay what would certainly be a fierce overreaction.

She found herself in a corridor with several doors and no indication where any of them led. There was a horrible sewage stench, which didn't bode well for the toilet. She heard the captain's voice, sharp in the main room of the station, making reference to her whereabouts and how being covered in piss was not an excuse for letting a prisoner wander away, and he had a mind to put Anna back in the cell and Carmine with her. Angry boots stomped toward the door, no doubt attached to Carmine.

Anna rattled a doorknob, hoping for a place to hide. It was locked. She hustled down the corridor to the next door. To her relief, the handle gave. Stepping through, she edged it closed, just as the door to the corridor opened and Carmine shouted, “Miss Blanc?” His voice trembled.

The room reeked worse than the hall. It was white walled with a cold cement floor and a curtain that divided the chamber. Behind the curtain, a light cast shadows onto the cloth—shadows of a man and a woman and a lump on a slab. Anna covered her mouth with a perfumed handkerchief and tried not to gag. The man's shadow was long and overly thin, made more so by the angle of the light. He pulled a sheet away from the lump—a lump shaped like a body. Anna perked up. A body in a police morgue could mean just one thing…

Murder.

The door flung open with a bang, smacking Anna in the face and sandwiching her against the wall. She swallowed a scream and held still. Carmine stuck in his red face and looked about like a child in a game of hide and seek who thought his playmates were cheating. He grunted at the stench, as if he himself didn't smell like an outhouse. Satisfied that Anna was not present, he removed himself, leaving a lingering scent of urine. Anna breathed in little shallow pants of fetid air, trying to catch her breath without making a sound or losing her peanut butter sandwich. She felt a warm trickle on her brow. Reaching up, she smeared a streak of blood across her forehead. She paid no mind to the wound. Her attention was focused on the drama playing out before her.

“Well, can you identify her?” asked the thin man.

“Are you sure it's a she?” the woman said.

“I realize the body's in bad condition. She was in the water a long time.”

Anna chewed her handkerchief. The woman leaned over the slab. She had the silhouette of a matron, busty, thick-wasted, with a large feathered hat. What appeared to be a dead fox swung from her neck like a pendulum in the space between her bosom and the lump. She slung it back over her shoulder. “It's one of Monique's girls. Rose something. See the tattoo? There's no love lost between me and Monique,
but I don't like seeing innocent girls murdered in cold blood, even if it is the competition.”

“It was a suicide.”

“Suicide my ass!”

Anna brought one hand to her mouth in a silent, airless gasp. In a flash of black taffeta, feathers, and dyed red hair, the woman flung the curtain aside, coming face to face with the fugitive as the drape swung back into place. Caught and not knowing what else to do, Anna hit the floor like a dropped confection, feigning a swoon. The woman considered her only a moment, and stepped over her body and out the door, leaving a heavy trail of rose perfume.

Anna played possum in case the thin man should come out from behind the curtain. She lay with her cheek pressed to the cold cement floor, and alternated between marveling at the woman's gall and wondering how one could tell if a decomposed corpse had been murdered. She heard a door open and shut. A gust of air made the curtain swell. The thin man had left through a different door. Anna sat up and listened.

Out on the station floor, she heard the woman's bland voice. “There's a debutante passed out in the morgue.”

Anna heard shouting and a rush of feet. She dropped back onto the tile, closing her eyes. She was glad that even minor head wounds bleed rivers. Her face contorted in pain, only partly an act, as the stolen books were jabbing into her belly.