“You could have waited inside,” I said.
“Wouldn’t be polite,” Red Man said, and levered himself upright in a surprisingly fluid motion for one so thick and tall. I had reason to know his remorseless strength, but his muscle was padded everywhere by an inch of soft fat, so that he sometimes put me in mind of a corn husk doll with sturdy stitching and inflexible limbs. He might have been handsome if he put his mind to it; his wide face and moon eyes had intrigued me when we first met, before I understood the stoicism in him, and the cruelty carefully deployed in Victor’s service. We respected one another, and we kept the considerate distance of two of Victor’s most valued possessions.
“Can I get you something?” I asked when he closed the door behind him. “I can put some coffee on.”
“Do you still have any of that bourbon Vic gave us for Christmas?”
I laughed and shook my head. “Why the hell not,” I said, and headed for the liquor cabinet. Red Man made himself comfortable on the chaise in my living room, an old deco piece that I’d lifted from the effects of one of Victor’s deceased generals. Ghoulish, maybe, but Barney had died of a heart attack, not a knife, and his good taste couldn’t do him any more good where he’d gone. Red Man, who knew its history precisely, stretched out those long, thick legs and waited with a smile for me to serve him.
I poured two stiff fingers in two glasses of heavy crystal and chipped two spears of ice from the block to drop in each.
Red Man clinked the ice against the rim with a meditative swish. I pulled up a chair, spread my knees wide, and waited.
“Usually take it neat,” he said, after a moment.
I shrugged. “It tastes better this way.”
“The way Victor likes it.”
“Yes.”
“He once crippled a man for making his with soda. The bartender before Dev … Mitch, remember him? Stabbed the man’s hand through with a steak knife. With none of your artistry, Phyllis.”
He smiled a little, mostly with his eyes. He could be unsettlingly gentle, and I liked him, even when he scared me. After all, I sometimes liked myself, too.
I took a chill swallow of liquor I didn’t taste. “Lucky Dev is more careful.” Dev had circled around for years, doing the odd run and then disappearing, before he settled into the bartender job. I remembered it was ’35, when DA Dewey’s investigations had all of mobbed-up Manhattan shooting slugs at their shadows. Victor got taken in, but he had always been meticulous about covering his tracks; he offered up a few lieutenants to the gods of criminal justice and walked away with a vagrancy charge. Afterward he was happy to take on Dev, a refugee from Dutch Schultz’s sinking ship—for his discretion as much as for his hands.
My ice rattled against the edge of the glass. A natural enough response, for someone else’s hands. I looked down at the offending member—left—and it stilled. A memory of the ache that had passed through it this morning returned, and settled in the twists of my intestines. Was this it, then? Were the rumors true? The second dream had come, an oracle of the imminent desertion of my only power?
I looked back up at Red Man watching me, face like a portrait.
“What’s the job?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows slightly, which communicated a certain reserved sympathy. But he wouldn’t answer before he was ready. “You know, Tammy was after me all morning to read my cards.”
“Was she?” I said. Tamara always treated Red Man like a beloved younger brother, as though she didn’t know precisely what he was. It was enough to give a girl goosebumps, like you’d watch a fool sitting on a flagpole.
He nodded. “And I told her Vic wouldn’t have any of his people playing numbers with his bank, but she insisted. Said the numbers were for more than stealing old widows’ pensions in Harlem.”
I laughed out loud. “She said that?”
He raised his glass and I lifted mine in response. “You know our Tammy. At least she keeps it quiet when Vic is around.”
“At least.”
I poured myself another shot. The booze was washing out the fear, or at least my awareness of it, and my hands were steady again, steady as they’d been since the luck had touched them twenty-five years ago.
“So, what’s the number, Walter?”
“Six, two, and seven. Tammy said the cards were solid, but I should exercise caution in love. Recommendation to play.”
“Sounds good. We could always bet with Lucky Luciano’s bank.” I said it just for the reaction; Red Man’s lip curled at the name of Vic’s biggest competitor in the Harlem numbers racket, now that white men had busted up the black banks of my youth.
“You could.”
A shiver twisted up my spine. “You have a job for me,” I said.
“Victor has a job,” he corrected, amicably. “But you weren’t surprised to see me, were you?”
“I had a special delivery early this morning. You didn’t…”
Do it? I wanted to ask, but stopped because a shadow crossed his face and his lips drew back, ever so slightly, from his teeth.
“No,” he said, shortly. “Tell me.”
“Maryann West. That’s what the note called her. She was beat bloody and I let her get away. Why the devil didn’t he just kill her and leave me out of it?”
“Victor likes to play.”
He did, I knew that well enough, but it surprised me every time when Victor dared play Red Man. The tie between them was decades old and thick with debt. It seemed that they scared everyone but each other. Red Man reached into his leather satchel and pulled out a thin manila folder. The picture clipped to the front of the file was of a white woman in her late forties, gray hair unflatteringly cropped, with squinting eyes that might have been hard, or sad.
“She looked a bit different this morning,” I said.
“But you let her go.”
“I don’t kill anyone on just Victor’s say-so. And not in my own damn home. Which Victor knows.”
“Oh, he knows. He could get a dozen of his men to bump this lady off, but you, you need reasons.”
“He wouldn’t want me if I didn’t.”
Red Man hesitated. “You’re very sure of that, Phyllis?”
My pulse jumped. “The whole point of making me an angel was to mete out justice. Which means I get to choose.”
“It’s a nice place you’ve made here, Pea. Nice furniture. Nice neighborhood. You have a good life, and Russian Vic made it for you.”
“We have an arrangement. That doesn’t mean he owns me.”
His smile, his kind moon eyes, they stopped me cold. “Doesn’t it? Victor wants this done, and he wants his knife to do it.”
I crunched the ice between my teeth and sucked in a sharp, bourbon-scented breath. “What if she says no?”
Red Man considered this; at least, he set down his glass and turned his gaze from me to the lacquered Chinese screen separating the parlor from the dining room. He steepled his fingers over the gentle curve of his belly and took a deep, soulful breath. I wanted to agree so badly I could have vomited acceptance on my shoes. I would kill that woman, crime unknown, just to avoid learning who I was without judgment in my hands. But I wanted the other path more.
“You know my name,” he said.
I frowned. “For a while now, Walter. What’s your point?”
“Point is,” he said, “no one uses it.” He addressed this to the screen’s jade dragons, breathing gold fire. I couldn’t read his face. “Even you call me Red Man same as everyone else down in the Pelican. I’m past minding, these days. But my name is Walter Finch, and for a long time, you and Dev were the only ones who had bothered to know it. Now Tamara does, of course.” He shook his head with a faint smile. “You ever wonder why I took my time finding you two all those years back? I waited as long as I dared. Because I thought, maybe they can get out. I thought knowing my name meant something. I thought we might be the same that way, for all you like pretending you’ve never been north of 110th Street. But you!” H
e laughed, and looked at me. His face was tired and angry and hopeful, a spring of emotion conflicted and deep, a sensibility with which I had never credited him.
“I could have killed you myself for wasting that chance—I hadn’t realized that you liked it.”
I took a startled, hiccuping breath. He looked like Red Man, lounging with casual menace on my dead man’s chaise, but he was right, that was just a name other people called him. I had believed what I wanted, because it was easier, because calling him “Red Man” with white folks helped them dismiss my thick lips and stiff hair.
“And you don’t like it?” I asked. “Good bourbon, money, power? You’ve fooled a passel of people if you don’t, Walter.”
I watched him make a decision; he swung his legs around to the floor and faced me. “I liked it for a time. The same as you. Victor saved my life—no, I won’t tell you the story—but it was at the very beginning, when he was just a jumped-up runner. We built this empire together. And then I fell in love and I had children and one day I realized I was still only what I had always been: the muscle, the dirty right hand. But it’s too late, now. And I want my children as far away from this business as I can keep them, which means I stay right here. I have to be Red Man so they can be something better.” He paused, and bitterness veined his next words: “Victor won’t let me be anything else.”
“Children,” I said, too stunned for coherence. “No wonder you didn’t want anything to do with me when we met.”
Red Man—Walter—smiled again. “I was flattered, Pea. I don’t talk about my family, though, you understand; I’m telling you this now to answer your question. You ask me what Victor will do if you say no—I know what he’d do to me. So I say yes. But you? You lose this place. You lose your money and your power. You probably have to leave the city. But you don’t have a husband, you don’t have any kids that I know of. You don’t even have Dev, this time.” I flinched; Walter saw it, but was kind enough to pretend he didn’t. “You say no, that’s the end. Victor won’t ever take you back. But he might let you go.”
I thought of Gloria and the kids. Victor knew a lot about me, but I’d changed my last name and pretended for him as much as anyone that I had sprung, off-white and fully formed, from a smoky stage in a Times Square club.
* * *
Victor was a hard little knot of a man, and had been as long as I’d known him. He’d had all his own teeth back then, in the good old dry days of Prohibition. If he didn’t speak or smile or reveal himself with any other telling gesture, you might have even fooled yourself into thinking him handsome.
But Victor had been born ugly, with tastes for violence and vulgarity and opulence that distracted, but did not hide, that essential core. I won’t say I was fooled by him, but I was twenty when we met—fresh-faced, full of my own beauty, new enough to passing to be more thrilled than exhausted by it. And then Victor taught me to kill. It was easy, deadly easy, that first time.
It only got hard later, when the slip slip of knives into vital arteries started to wriggle like spiked minnows in my own veins. It had started to wear at me before Dev. Five years had meant a lot of kills in Russian Vic’s service. But Dev changed me, or he had at least changed how I saw myself.
At its easiest, love is a blanket; at its hardest, a black mirror—it isn’t just your flaws that show stark against that high-yellow skin, it’s your ghosts.
“Not even Dev,” I said, and pulled the lighter from my pocket.
“He still watches you, you know. Every night you’re there.”
“He watches Tamara.”
“Everyone watches Tamara.”
I flicked the lid on and off.
“Out of curiosity,” I said, “what did she do, Victor’s job? Who is Maryann West?”
He opened the manila file to reveal the pictures inside. A dead white man slouched against a stack of crates on a concrete floor, his jeans stiff and dark, blending with the bottom half of an untucked flannel shirt. On the right of the image, dark columns of police officers’ legs threw stark, looming shadows across the floor and the body. A roll of police tape fluttered, unattached, in the corner. The photo was clean, well composed, its beauty easy to miss in the visceral horror of its subject matter. Walter had an artist’s eye, which some would say was wasted. I appreciated it today, because he had framed the shot to draw attention to one particular detail.
The man’s arms, crossed over his chest. The ragged stumps of his wrists, where the hands had been hacked away.
“I dreamed about them,” I said, faintly. “What does Aunt Sally’s dream book say about severed hands? Six, six, six? Maybe I should play.”
“You dreamed?” Genuine surprise in his voice, maybe even concern, but I was far away.
“Second dream, you know what they say.”
“Just rumors.”
“And that’s what some white folks say about the hands, too.”
He paused. “Not Victor.”
“No.” I pushed the folder toward him. “This isn’t one of the old photos? It looks just the same.”
I’d destroyed my life to avenge these murders. I still had nightmares of Trent Sullivan; the sound of his girl pounding her hands bloody on the bathroom door while I struggled with him on his bed, killing as a parody of love.
“It’s new,” Red Man said, just as soft. “Body turned up five days ago. And Victor says that Maryann West did it.”
So it was happening again. The rumors that even Sonny knew had spawned another believer. My second dream was true.
“Does it work, Walter? If they’re going to kill us for our hands, do they at least get something from them?”
He brushed a finger across my right wrist. “Whatever they get, Pea, it’s never enough.”
4
I wore my best dress and my best knives and careful makeup, so I thought I might pass for twenty-five in the dim, smoked light of the Pelican. I hadn’t said yes, and I hadn’t said no. I was still Victor’s knife, for as long as the hands held out, or for as long as I could bear to use them.
The Pelican was a different world on Friday and Saturday nights. Then, Victor was in it to make money, as much as possible. We had a line like any other club, and men in dark suits to take your measure and pronounce you worthy. It was always integrated—Victor made a point of that—but the strange weekday crowd, the anarchist syndicate meetings and the Yiddish one-act operas and Japanese-inspired poetic dance plays and French expressionist cabaret that Tamara had spent the last two years curating, like some kind of demented talent manager who never quite got it through her head that the Pelican was a verifiable, bona-fide, bodies-in-the-dumpster mob joint, and who through sheer conviction had made everyone else play along until her mad vision had become as real as my knives—that world dimmed to muted pastels when the Long Islanders and Upper East Siders descended upon the Village with their wide sedans and straining billfolds. Those nights, Tamara still put on her tasseled pasties and twirled them with a python named Georgie around her neck, and she smiled, because she knew that as long as she did this job, Victor would keep letting her have her way the other five nights of the week. It suited him to court that air of dangerous exoticism, to let his white clients, both over and under the table, gawp at us and fear us. Even me—though he didn’t know it.
I walked past the line—checking for my boys in uniform—and smiled at the man behind the velvet rope. He must be new, or moved up from some other grunt detail, because I didn’t recognize him. He recognized me, though. The blood drained from his face. If I’d said “boo” I swear he would have fainted. He stumbled forward and unhooked the rope.
“This way, ma’am,” he said.
I smiled as kindly as I could, though it was clear he couldn’t tell. I walked through the doors, a little sick of the kind of woman they must imagine me to be, and by my own design.
In the twenties the Pelican had been an old Russian cigar club, and Victor had retained the mahogany paneling and leather walls while adding a few
judicious modern touches: geometric glass chandeliers trimmed with chrome, Chinese silk curtains, and a gleaming zinc bar lit from behind, so that its rows of bottles glowed gold and green and amber. The stage was catty-corner to the bar, with a dozen round tables in between, but on nights the crowd wasn’t elbow to elbow the barman had as good a view as anyone of Tamara’s jungle dance. At ten, the place was bumping but not full up. I smiled at the regulars and noted the faces that meant Victor was here already—not on the floor, but behind the false bookshelf in the corner, which led to his office.
On stage, Charlie was going at it with his swing band, playing that new bebop jazz that was catching like brush fire in the Harlem clubs, but was unusual in a downtown joint like the Pelican. On Wednesdays, Charlie got up on the Pelican’s stage to play with a little five-piece, wreathed in marijuana smoke like clouds. The Village’s most dedicated hepcats came to pray, close their eyes, and shake their heads and shout in scatting tongues. He called that bebop too, but on weekends he played the down-tone version. Even then, the jumpy drums and circuitous, laddered chords made for hard listening and even harder dancing. I caught a few strains of “Tea for Two,” but his French horn veered off as soon as I had them, layering and riffing. Victor let Charlie have his way until eleven, enough for the Pelican to maintain its reputation for the avant-garde, but not enough to put off the paying white customers who came to enjoy big band swing and a beautiful girl dancing with a snake. Tamara wasn’t out yet. I wanted to talk to her, but she was as likely to be with an admirer backstage as she was to be alone, and the thought of putting off some amorous white boy who thought he was playing with fire was enough to make me feel old as Gloria looked this afternoon.
My feet took me to the bar without my asking and I leaned my back against it, watching for the dentist or my three soldiers, anyone to distract me from the barman shaking martinis just four feet away. Dev filled two glasses from shakers in either hand—at once showy and economical. One of the appreciative gentlemen bit off his olive and asked him what he thought of Hitler’s chances in Russia.
Trouble the Saints Page 3