Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

“Christ, sugar, make it out of what?”

  “I’m in over my head. Maybe I always have been, and I just now noticed. But I’m going to see it through. Probably … better you not call me till it’s over.”

  “And how will I know?”

  I gave her Dev’s number. And then, after a moment, Walter’s.

  After we hung up, I picked up my holster and played with the four-inch throwing knife—over my head, behind my back, and then into the wall behind me. I considered the advantages of my injury: I would look less dangerous than I was. I could kill with my left hand as easily as my right. I unsheathed the three-inch knife and threw it in the wall, next to the first. Two kills, sweet and clean. Do that one more time, and then walk away forever.

  I wrenched the knives from the plaster. Some dust came after them and settled on the floor and the thick fringe of Turkish carpet. I didn’t bother to clean it up.

  7

  I waited until that night. Dev didn’t call or come by.

  Hitler was invading the Soviet Union, had been for the past month, crossing its borders from the Baltic to the Black Sea with a flood of soldiers, hundreds and hundreds of thousands, so many that I couldn’t make myself believe the numbers printed in the papers.

  If Roosevelt had his way we’d be in the war the day after tomorrow.

  Tamara called to check on me, and to update me on the latest gossip from the dentist’s big show. I talked for longer than I should, gripped despite myself with a certain Schadenfreude at the image of the dentist earnestly standing beside his six paintings of show horses with anatomically correct smiles while the packed house thronged the Hungarian exile’s sculptures of creeping death.

  We argued about the war and never mentioned the men who might get killed in it. I caught myself staring at the delivery boy who brought by my paper in the morning, wondering if he’d get drafted, or volunteer, and if he’d make it out the other end. The delivery boy just held out his hand for a tip and skipped off.

  The second time Tamara called, I gave in.

  “Dev?” she repeated, and stopped short. “Well, I don’t know that I’ve seen him today, sugar. I think he’s tending the bar in a few hours, but you know that we’ve been giving one another a little more room these days.”

  “Did he ask you to?”

  “Well,” she drawled, with a certain acid knowing that made me pull the receiver away from my ear. “He disappeared, more like. But I got his point. Is there something in particular you want him for?”

  I knew Tamara always meant just what she said when she was that precise in her diction. I grimaced and changed the subject.

  “How on earth did Marty get a showing at the Pelican in the first place?”

  “Oh, you know, whatever Victor says, goes. I only get so much freedom over here.”

  “But what kind of favors could Vic owe his dentist?”

  Tamara laughed after the briefest of pauses, which might have contained worry or surprise or just dead air. “Maybe he had a few tough extractions,” she said.

  I laughed with her, though I didn’t much feel like it, and I doubted she did either. Dev wasn’t around and Marty would enjoy the dubious benefits of Victor’s favor, as long as it lasted. I could have told him, it never did. Tammy begged off the call a minute later, and I sat with myself for a little while. I always worked best alone.

  I prepared myself: dark burgundy dress, a rack number from Macy’s that I bought by the half dozen and didn’t care if I had to throw out at the end of a night’s work. Knife holster for three five-inch knives and two three-inch knives tucked away in my garters. Sometimes I brought more, but I wouldn’t need them tonight. For this, I wouldn’t need more than one, but I liked the feel of them too, and the illusion of protection that glittered in my peripheral vision when I moved with their weight through the world.

  My hands twisted and ached like they wanted to send me another dream, but I knew they didn’t; they were just furious and long ready for me to fulfill their true purpose. They had tried to tell me about the deception. When I’d killed Trent, I must have known—not in my head, or even in my heart, but in my muscles and bones, in the hands that had slaughtered, full knowing, an innocent man. They might yet forgive me for that, but they demanded recompense first, they demanded real justice. Kill Russian Vic, kill the white man who had stolen them and twisted them into this unnatural, deadly shape, and I might yet live to dream another true dream.

  I passed Walter’s man outside the door and nodded to him. Surprised, he nodded back. I wondered if he’d tail me, but he stayed on the building. Thoughtful of Walter. He wouldn’t stop me, he’d said. But did I wish he would?

  It felt different, this last time.

  There had been an excitement before, an anticipation of glory that had counterbalanced the jittery fear of facing death. Even my last kill—some skinflint numbers banker down in Bed-Stuy, who had tried to buy me off for an amount I knew was half of his nightly take—had greeted me with that raw, fluttering edge of purpose before I sliced his throat. The edge was dull and rusted now, liable to poison my blood. I was scared, at last. Fifteen years too late, my guts twisted like flypaper at a July cookout. What had I thought my heart was made of, that it could kill and kill and stay whole? I’d stepped through that banker’s steaming blood as though I were wiping my ass after a good shit, and I hadn’t noticed until later the faint click of a door closing. If I wanted to kill again, I’d have to break my own self down.

  The hands didn’t care. The hands were decided.

  On the corner of Christopher Street and Bleecker was an office building that had not bothered to tear down its out-of-code fire escape from its tenement days, a rusty ladder with short platforms beneath each window. Back when Victor bought the building someone had noted that a good shot might barely make the narrow angle from the top of the fire escape into the back office bathroom window. Victor’s answer had been to board up the window; if you can’t see, you can’t shoot, he said. This had worked for so long that everyone seemed to have forgotten the reason the window was boarded in the first place; at least, the second to top slat had fallen to one side for months and no one had thought to repair it. The angle was nearly impossible. I had to hang from the top rung of the fire escape and wait for the precise moment when Victor finished his business, washed his hands, and leaned forward to check his hair in the mirror. When his head lined up with the missing slat, I’d throw. He’d be dead before he saw me.

  It took longer to climb with one arm, and everything hurt by the time I got to the top. When I heard him in there, I’d have to climb down three rungs, hook my feet into the rusty bars, and throw. I waited. A half hour, an hour, a moon gone from fat and red against the silhouette of the West Side docks to high and bright above my head. I wondered if Dev had started his shift at the bar, and what he would think of me when he saw what I’d done. Would it count as a good deed in his ledger, just as my hands demanded it be? Or would it be yet another sin? My heart sure thought so—it turned to lead at the thought of another fucking corpse brought down to the floor by my butcher’s blade, my idiot precision.

  The bathroom door opened. Victor was speaking to someone, but I was too far away to make out the words, just his unmistakable cadence. I climbed down three rungs and locked my legs firmly against the metal. I’d be doing the world a favor to rid it of his open-ended questions. He took his sweet time on the pot. His long, wet farts echoed in the air between us. Around my growing terror I managed to think, well, at least I’m not close enough to smell it. Victor stood. I unwrapped my good arm from the ladder and hung there, supported by nothing more than good stomach muscles and practice. He washed his hands in front of the mirror. He moved in and out of sight, but not long enough for even my hands to land the throw. For a delirious moment, I thought he’d just leave. I thought I’d missed my chance. But he paused and leaned forward. He opened his mouth and I realized—he was flicking his nail against his silver teeth. I couldn’t imagine why, but I shuddered an
yway.

  I lifted my favorite three-inch knife and readied the throw.

  It was a tricky shot, but easy enough for me, with all my uncanny force behind it. A second passed. Two seconds. My hands chanted, Ready, now, ready, now. I smelled a hot wind, burning flesh, algae rotting on a distant sea. It was their breath against my ear, their fury, their thirst to make things right after all the wrong I had done.

  But I couldn’t, I couldn’t, not even Victor.

  For years, you have wasted us, betrayed us and twisted our purpose.

  I drew back my arm.

  Ready, now, ready—

  Victor looked up; the hands howled; I dropped the knife.

  * * *

  I scrambled back down the fire escape. Jumped rungs, slipped against the next, swung my left arm up blindly, banged my right arm so hard that I whimpered. Feet safe on the alley floor, thank the Lord. I bent down to retrieve the knife that had fallen and clattered like gunfire on the cobbles. A block away, Victor was screaming. No words, just needling rage. His men would search this alley in a second. Carefully, I removed my sling and my holster, shoved them under a light coat I’d stashed behind a dumpster and walked onto Christopher Street, away from the Pelican. Behind me, men were running.

  I didn’t think Victor had seen me, but he’d certainly seen something. Those stolen hands of his, those shiny teeth, what did they tell him about betrayal? How soon would he know what I had been unable to do?

  My guard was gone by the time I got back to my apartment building. I wondered if Victor had recalled all of his men on duty. I wondered how long before he heard that I hadn’t even tried to get an alibi. You should get out of town, Phyllis, I thought, I did think it, but instead I went back up to my apartment and fell asleep on the chaise lounge, beside a silent telephone.

  The dream came back, rushing in like water from a broken faucet. Me in that white dress, two hands in the holster instead of knives, and Victor in front of me shining like a chrome hubcap. “You killed those men,” said a voice that used to belong to someone, but had doubled and tripled and repeated into a chorus who were the hands, pointing at me.

  I woke up wrists aching, thirsty, blinking in a bright shaft of light from a high, gibbous moon. The light was snuffed and then resumed; someone, I understood groggily, had passed the window. Tamara, I thought, until she crossed the Turkish carpet and I recognized her.

  I had thought, naïvely, that having shot me once, Maryann West might just leave me alone.

  She reeked of grain alcohol and subway muck, but her clothes were damp and her face scrubbed nearly clean, like she’d taken a dip in a fountain before coming to finish what she started. She held a gun, of course. I pictured my knives where I had left them, in their holster slung over the back of a chair three useless feet to my left.

  “Raise your hands,” she said. A child had drawn the bags under her eyes in eggplant-colored crayon, frown lines radiated from her mouth in charcoal gray.

  I didn’t move. It would take me four seconds to lunge for a knife and throw it. I had a good chance—a better one, at least, than I had point-blank from a raw barrel and a shaky trigger finger. But I just met her moonlit eyes and shrugged. If she hadn’t killed me yet, she would wait a little while longer.

  “You whore, raise your goddamned—”

  “How are you here?”

  The gun jerked. I thought of Dev—a hard, final grenade full of the shrapnel of lost years—but she didn’t shoot. She said, “The door was open. And I got to wondering what on earth you wanted to ask me back there. Someone like you.”

  I must have forgotten to lock when I stumbled back here. Such a stupid reason to die, but maybe that was always what caught us in the end. We drugged ourselves with illusions of competence, until fallibility laughed, and knocked us off.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” I said.

  “Because I’ve got the gun.”

  Four seconds. Better odds if her finger eased off that trigger. Shock might do it, or sympathy. Not much of the latter going around these days, so I tried instead, “Victor told me that Trent Sullivan had murdered some people for their hands—people like me. That’s why I killed him. But I had wanted to ask you if Victor had lied.”

  The woman radiated outrage. “He said my Trent killed—”

  It took three seconds, and hurt just as much as I thought it would. I rolled from the chaise, pulled down my holster, unsheathed a knife, and threw. It slid into her right shoulder. The gun discharged and then rattled to the floor while she clutched at the hilt.

  “I wouldn’t take that out,” I said, panting.

  She cursed and stumbled forward. “Trent saved your life. That’s what I want you to know.”

  “Saved my life? What, he put in a good word for me? Do you know how many people died because Trent fingered them?”

  She wrinkled her nose, as though it had been impolite of me to mention it. “At least they didn’t feel a thing. I can promise you that. Unlike my Trent.”

  Maryann West reached for the gun in spite of her own blood soaking into the carpet. I lunged and pushed her back against the door. Her heart labored against my breastbone. Even with one arm, even without a knife, oh Christ, she would be so easy. One hard snap and I wouldn’t have to worry about her nasty habit of trying to kill me. I tried to keep my home clean, but her blood already stained my best carpet. I could make an exception.

  “Go,” I said. “I won’t kill you but Victor will. So save yourself and go.”

  “I haven’t slept a night through since what you did to Trent. You ruined my life.”

  We were pressed close as lovers, her blood soaking my shirt, spittle wet on my face. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not yet, you’re not.”

  She left. I knew why I hadn’t killed her, but the enormity of it pushed me to my knees. I stared at the open door.

  I didn’t know how Maryann West planned to hurt me next, but I was sure she’d try. I couldn’t blame her, I couldn’t kill her, I could hardly defend myself. I had murdered an innocent man. My sins had turned my hands.

  “Pea?”

  Dev in the open doorway. Dev, locking it behind him before coming to where I sat on the floor. He fingered the spilled intestines of cotton fluff from the bullet hole in my chaise. His forehead shone with sweat, gathered in the furrowed skin of his frown. I touched his eyebrows, willing it away. I’d thought I was going to die ten minutes ago, and now Dev looked at me like he could swallow me up. I realized I was very tired.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  “Maryann West.”

  “The blood…”

  “Hers.”

  “But she’s not dead?”

  “I’m going soft, Dev,” I said. “I couldn’t.”

  I watched him realize. “Oh, Pea. It was you, then? The attempt on Victor?”

  I laughed and laughed. “What attempt? I told you, I’m soft. I can’t do it anymore. Even though they want me to, this time. My—I don’t know—my heart?” I gulped for air. “It feels like it’s cracking apart, every time I lift the knife…”

  He held me until I stopped crying. He pulled back. “Can you stand? There’s no one after you right now. Victor is rampaging but I think he’ll go through quite a number of his men before he gets to you. He didn’t see you.”

  Against my better judgment, I relaxed at that.

  “How are you here?” I asked a second apparition, for the second time that night.

  He blinked and rested his hand against my collarbone, so his thumb jumped with my racing pulse. “I—had a feeling,” he said, haltingly, “that someone far away was thinking of me, and that they were dying, and that they had loved me for a very long time…”

  “So you came straight here, huh?” I couldn’t meet his eyes.

  He smiled, with all the tenderness that only Dev could find, and kissed me. “Pea,” he said, after long minutes, “you don’t understand—”

  But I did, enough. “Take me to bed, Devajyoti.�
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  8

  I had nearly died twice, and the second time seemed to shake loose the last of the mortar from his defenses. Dev loved me, or something like it. He slept in my bed and joy kept me awake until exhaustion bludgeoned its way through at dawn. When I woke, the sun shone noon through the windows and he stared, unseeing, at a paper in his hands.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Maryann West is dead.”

  I started to laugh.

  “Arsenic,” he said.

  I stopped laughing. “You’re serious.”

  The light gilded his sable eyelashes and the peppery stubble on his cheeks. He’d dressed, but hastily, and though I supposed Dev would always look beautiful to me, today he cast a ragged, overdrawn shadow. I sat up and stretched in the tangled sheets, and the detritus of my old life eddied beneath me, flaking already to dust. Dev cast a glance at my naked breasts, dark nipples contracting in the warmth of the sun and his presence, and shook his head with a wondering smile.

  “I need to go to the precinct. She was poisoned, of course.”

  “Victor likes arsenic.”

  “When he doesn’t like you,” he said, and I flinched. Then, “I know. I’m sorry. This is … nothing is what I thought it would be. You’re not what I thought you would be. But I look back on myself then and all I can think is how foolish I was.”

  “You were young,” I said. Like Adam, I felt my nakedness now.

  “I was. Yet old enough.” I had five years on him, which meant Dev had been twenty when he played his pipes and took me from the city. Only youth could be that brave, or that stupid.

  “I wanted you to be right about me.”

  “I did too, Pea.”

  “And now?” I started shivering.

  He turned from the window and sat heavily on the edge of my bed. “The trouble,” he said, “is that I wasn’t right about me. I had no business judging you then, and I certainly don’t now. All that’s left for me is to atone—”

  He stopped himself and took my hand. He smiled, painfully but genuinely, and rested his head on my lap.