In front of the center staircase, WBZ had placed three radiophones in their black stands. A large woman in a light blue dress stood by one of them, consulting with a man in a beige suit and yellow bow tie. The woman patted the buns of her hair repeatedly and sipped from a glass of pale, foggy liquid.
Most men in the crowd wore tuxedos or dinner jackets. There were a few in suits, so Joe wasn’t the only sore thumb in the gathering, but he was the only one still wearing a hat. He thought of removing it, but that would put the face on the front page of everyone’s evening edition in clear view. He glanced up at the mezzanine; there were plenty of hats up there because that’s where all the reporters and photographers mingled with the swells.
He dipped his chin and headed for the nearest staircase. It was slow going, the crowd pushing together, now that they’d seen the radiophones and the round woman in the blue dress. Even with his head down, he noticed Chappie Geygan and Boob Fowler talking with Red Ruffing. Joe, a Red Sox fanatic as long as he could remember, had to remind himself that it might not be a good idea for a wanted man to walk up to three baseball players and chat about their batting averages. He squeezed his way around the back of them, though, hoping he might hear a snippet to clear up the trade rumors about Geygan and Fowler, but all he heard was talk about the stock market, Geygan saying the only way to make real money was to buy on margin, any other way was for suckers who wanted to stay poor. That’s when the large woman in the light blue dress stepped up to the microphone and cleared her throat. The man beside her stepped to the other radiophone and raised an arm to the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure,” the man said, “WBZ Radio, Boston, 1030 on your dial, is here live from the Grand Lobby of the landmark Hotel Statler. I’m Edwin Mulver and it gives me great pleasure to present to you Mademoiselle Florence Ferrel, mezzo-soprano with the San Francisco Opera.”
Edwin Mulver stepped back, his chin tilted up, as Florence Ferrel patted the buns of her hair one more time and then exhaled into her radiophone. The exhalation turned, without warning, into a mountain peak of a high note that thrummed through the crowd and climbed three stories to the ceiling. It was a sound so extravagant and yet so authentic it filled Joe with an awful loneliness. She was bearing forth something from the gods, and as it moved from her body into his, Joe realized he would die someday. He knew it in a different way than he’d known it coming through the door. Coming through the door, it had been a distant possibility. Now, it was a callous fact, indifferent to his dismay. In the face of such clear evidence of the otherworldly, he knew, beyond argument, that he was mortal and insignificant and had been taking steps out of the world since the day he’d entered it.
As she ventured deeper into the aria, the notes grew ever higher, ever longer, and Joe pictured her voice as a dark ocean, beyond end, beyond depth. He looked around at the men in their tuxedos and the women in their glittering taffeta and silk sheaths and lace wreaths, at the champagne flowing from a fountain in the center of the lobby. He recognized a judge and Mayor Curley and Governor Fuller and another infielder for the Sox, Baby Doll Jacobson. By one of the pianos, he saw Constance Flagstead, a local stage star, flirting with Ira Bumtroth, a known numbers man. Some people were laughing, and others tried so hard to look respectable it was laughable. He saw stern men with muttonchop sideburns and wizened matrons with skirts the shape of church bells. He identified Brahmins and blue bloods and Daughters of the American Revolution. He noted bootleggers and bootlegger lawyers and even the tennis player Rory Johannsen, who’d made it to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon last year before being knocked out by the Frenchman Henri Cochet. He saw bespectacled intellectuals trying not to get caught looking at frivolous flappers with insipid conversational skills but sparkling eyes and dazzling legs . . . and all of them soon to vanish from the earth. Fifty years from now, someone could look at a photograph of this night and most of the people in the room would be dead, and the rest would be on their way.
As Florence Ferrel finished her aria, he looked up toward the mezzanine and saw Albert White. Standing dutifully behind his right elbow was his wife. She was middle-aged and twig-thin, carrying none of the ample weight of a well-to-do matron. Her eyes were the biggest part of her, noticeable even from where Joe stood. They were bulging and frantic, even as she smiled at something Albert said to a chuckling Mayor Curley, who’d found his way up there with a glass of scotch.
Joe looked a few yards down the balcony and there was Emma. She wore a silver sheath dress and stood in a crowd near the wrought iron railing, a glass of champagne in her left hand. In this light, her skin was the white of the alabaster, and she looked stricken and alone, lost in a private grief. Was this who she was when she didn’t think he was looking? Was there some unnameable loss grafted to her heart? For a moment he feared she’d jump over the balcony rail, but then the sickness in her face turned to a smile. And he realized what had placed the grief in her face: she’d never expected to see him again.
Her smile widened and she covered it with her hand. It was the same hand that held the champagne glass, so the glass tipped and a few drops fell into the crowd below. One man looked up and touched the back of his head. A portly woman wiped at her brow then blinked her right eye several times.
Emma leaned back from the rail and tilted her head toward the staircase on his side of the lobby. Joe nodded. She moved away from the railing.
He lost her in the crowd above as he worked his way through the one below. He had noticed that most of the reporters on the mezzanine wore their hats back on their heads and their tie knots were crooked. So he pushed his hat back and loosened his tie as he squeezed through the last cluster of people and reached the staircase.
Officer Donald Belinski ran down toward him, a ghost who’d somehow risen from the pond floor, scraped the burned flesh from his bones, and now trotted down the staircase toward Joe—same blond hair, same blotchy complexion, same ridiculously red lips and pale eyes. No wait, this guy was fleshier, and his blond hair had already begun to recede and leaned a bit more toward red than pure blond. And even though Joe had only seen Belinski lying on his back, he was fairly certain the cop had been taller than this man. And probably smelled better too, this guy smelling of onions, Joe that close to him as they passed in the stairwell, the guy’s eyes narrowing. He swept a hank of oily red-blond hair off his forehead, his hat in his free hand, a Boston Examiner press ID tucked inside the grosgrain ribbon. Joe sidestepped him at the last moment, and the man fumbled with his hat.
Joe said, “Excuse me.”
The guy said, “My apologies,” but Joe could feel his eyes on him as he moved up the stairs fast, stunned at his own stupidity not only to have looked someone directly in the face but also to have looked a reporter directly in the face.
The guy called up the stairwell, “Excuse me, excuse me. You dropped something,” but Joe hadn’t dropped shit. He kept going, and a group entered the stairwell above him, already tipsy, one woman draped over another like a loose robe, and then Joe was passing through them and not looking back, not looking back, looking only forward.
At her.
She held a small purse that matched her dress and the silver feather and silver band in her hair. A small vein pulsed in her throat. Her shoulders rippled; her eyes flashed. It was all he could do not to clutch those shoulders and lift her off her feet until she wrapped her legs around his back and lowered her face to his. But instead he kept moving past her and said, “Guy just recognized me. Gotta move.”
She fell in beside him as he walked a red carpet past the main ballroom. The crowds were thick up here but not as jammed in as down below. You could move along the perimeter of the crowd easily enough.
“There’s a service elevator just past the next balcony,” she said. “Goes to the basement. I can’t believe you came.”
He took the right at the next opening, his head down, and pushed his hat to his fore
head, pulled it down tight. “What else was I going to do?”
“Run.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know. Jesus. It’s what people do.”
“It’s not what I do.”
The crowd grew thicker as they passed along the back of the mezzanine. Down below, the governor had taken the radiophone and was proclaiming today Hotel Statler Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a cheer went up, the crowd good and drunk now as Emma came abreast of him and nudged him to the left with her elbow.
He saw it now, past where their corridor intersected with another—a dark nook behind the banquet tables and the lights and the marble and red carpet.
Downstairs, a brass band struck its horns and the throngs in the mezzanine kicked up their heels and the flashbulbs flashed and popped and hissed. He wondered if any of the staff photographers would get back to their newsrooms and notice the guy in the background of some of their shots, the guy in the tan suit with the bounty on his head.
“Left, left,” Emma said.
He turned left between two banquet tables and the marble floor gave way to thin black tile. Another couple of steps and he reached the elevator. He pressed the down button.
Four drunken men passed along the edge of the mezzanine. They were a couple years older than Joe and singing “Soldiers Field.”
“O’er the stands of flaming Crimson,” the men crooned off-key, “the Harvard banners fly.”
Joe pressed the down button again.
One of the men met his eyes, then leered at Emma’s ass. He nudged a buddy as they continued to sing, “Cheer on cheer like volleyed thunder echoes to the sky.”
Emma grazed the side of his hand with her own. She said, “Shit, shit, shit.”
He pressed the button again.
A waiter banged through the two kitchen doors to their left, a large tray held aloft. He passed within three feet of them but never looked their way.
The Harvard guys had passed but they could still hear them:
“Then fight, fight, fight! For we win tonight.”
Emma reached past him and pressed the down button.
“Old Harvard forevermore!”
Joe considered slipping through the kitchen, but he suspected it was a box with, at best, a dumbwaiter to bring up food from the main kitchen two stories down. In retrospect, the smart thing would have been for Emma to come to him, not the other way around. If only he’d been thinking clearly, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.
He reached for the button again, but then he heard the car rising toward them.
“If there’s anyone in it, just show them your back,” he said. “They’ll be in a rush.”
“Not once they see my back,” she said, and he smiled in spite of the weight of his worry.
The car arrived and he waited but the doors stayed closed. He counted five beats of his own heart. He slid back the gate. He opened the door on an empty car. He looked back over his shoulder at Emma. She stepped in ahead of him and he followed. He closed the gate and then the door. He turned the crank and they began their descent.
She placed the flat of her palm to his cock and it immediately hardened as she covered his mouth with her own. He slid his free hand under her dress and between the heat of her thighs and she groaned into his mouth. Her tears fell on his cheekbones.
“Why’re you crying?”
“Because I might love you.”
“Might?”
“Yes.”
“Then laugh.”
“I can’t, I can’t,” she said.
“You know the bus station on St. James?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “What? Sure. Of course.”
He placed the locker key in her hand. “In case anything happens.”
“What?”
“Between here and freedom.”
“No, no, no, no,” she said. “No, no. You take this. I don’t want it.”
He waved it off. “Put it in your purse.”
“Joe, I don’t want this.”
“It’s money.”
“I know what it is and I don’t want it.” She tried handing it to him, but he held his hands high.
“Hold on to it.”
“No,” she said. “We’ll spend it together. I’m with you now. I’m with you, Joe. Take the key.”
She tried handing it to him again but they’d reached the basement.
The window in the door was black because the lights were off for some reason.
They weren’t off for “some” reason, Joe realized. There was only one reason.
He reached for the crank as the gate was thrown open from the other side and Brendan Loomis reached in and pulled Joe out of the car by his tie. He pulled Joe’s pistol free of the small of his back and tossed it off into the dark along the cement floor. Then he punched Joe in the face and the side of his head more times than Joe could count, all of it happening so fast Joe barely got his hands up.
Once he did, he reached back for Emma, thinking somehow he could protect her. But Brendan Loomis had a fist like a butcher’s mallet. Every time it hit Joe’s head—bap bap bap bap—Joe felt his brain go numb and his vision white out. His eyes slid through the white, unable to fix on anything. He heard his own nose break and then—bap bap bap—Loomis hit him in the same spot three more times.
When Loomis let go of his tie, Joe fell to all fours on the cement floor. He heard a series of steady drips, like leaky faucets, and opened his eyes to see his own blood dripping to the cement, the drops the size of nickels, but piling up so fast they turned into amoebas and the amoebas became puddles. He turned his head to see if somehow, some way, Emma had used his beating to slam the elevator door shut and make a run for it, but the elevator wasn’t where he’d left it, or he wasn’t where he’d left the elevator, because all he saw was a cement wall.
That’s when Brendan Loomis kicked him in the stomach hard enough to lift him off the floor. When he landed in a fetal position, he couldn’t find air. He gulped for it, but it wouldn’t come. He tried to rise to his knees, but his legs slid away from him, so he used his elbows to lift his chest off the cement and gulped like a fish, trying to get something down his windpipe but seeing his chest as a black stone, without openings, without gaps, nothing in there but the stone, no room for anything else, because he could not fucking breathe.
It pushed up his esophagus like a balloon through a fountain pen, squeezing his heart, crushing his lungs, closing off his throat, but then, finally, it punched up past his tonsils and out through his mouth. It had a whistle at its tail, a whistle and several gasps, but that was okay, that was fine, because he could breathe again, at least he could breathe.
Loomis kicked him in the groin from behind.
Joe ground his head into the cement floor and coughed and might have puked, he had no idea, the pain something he couldn’t have imagined prior to this. His balls were stuffed into his intestines; flames licked the walls of his stomach; his heart beat so fast it had to give out soon, just had to; his skull felt like someone had pried it open with their hands; his eyes bled. He vomited, vomited for certain, vomited bile and fire onto the floor. He thought he was done and then he did it again. He fell onto his back and looked up at Brendan Loomis.
“You look”—Loomis lit a cigarette—“unfortunate.”
Brendan swung from side to side with the room. Joe stayed where he was, but everything else was on a pendulum. Brendan looked down at Joe as he pulled on a pair of black gloves and flexed his fingers in them until they fit to his liking. Albert White appeared beside him, Albert on the same pendulum, and they both looked down at Joe.
Albert said, “I have to turn you into a message, I’m afraid.”
Joe looked up through the blood in his eyes at Albert in his white dinner jacket.
�
��To everyone out there who thinks it’s okay to disregard what I say.”
Joe looked for Emma, but he couldn’t find the elevator in all the swinging and swaying.
“It’s not going to be a nice message,” Albert White said. “And I’m sorry about that.” He squatted in front of Joe, his face sad, weary. “My mother always said everything happens for a reason. I’m not sure she was right, but I do think people often become what they’re supposed to be. I thought I was supposed to be a cop but then the city took my job and I became this. And most times I don’t like it, Joe. I fucking hate it to tell the truth, but I can’t deny that it comes natural to me. It fits. What comes natural to you, I’m afraid, is fucking up. All you had to do was run but you didn’t. And I’m sure—look at me.”
Joe’s head had lolled to the left. He rolled it back, met Albert’s kind gaze.
“I’m sure, as you die, you’ll tell yourself you did it for love.” Albert gave Joe a rueful smile. “But that’s not why you fucked up. You fucked up because it’s your nature. Because deep down you feel guilty about what you do, so you want to get caught. But in this line of work, you face your guilt at the end of every night. You turn it over in your hands, you make a ball of it. And then you pitch it into the fire. But you, you don’t do that, so you’ve spent your short life hoping someone will punish you for your sins. Well, I’m that someone.”
Albert rose from his crouch and Joe lost focus for a moment, everything turning to a blur. He caught a flash of silver and then another and he narrowed his eyes until the blurring sharpened and everything came into focus again.
And he wished it hadn’t.
Albert and Brendan still shimmied a bit, but the pendulum was gone. Emma stood beside Albert, her hand on his arm.
Live by Night Page 7