“What do you want, Tammy?”
Bebop and reefer till dawn, dancing in her stockinged feet on sticky floors, telling stories with Pea on warm summer nights, lingering glances with Dev and long kisses with Clyde, a whole rack of babies all the colors of the earth playing in the yard behind them, secure in the love of their aunties and uncles and free, as their parents could never be, of dreams and history and hard numbers.
She pressed her cheek against the window and counted her breaths. Walter didn’t speak for the rest of the ride. As they passed over the Harlem River into the Bronx she registered that they were far north, far from familiar Manhattan avenues, but she was remembering Pea and it was hard to see anything else.
He pulled in front of a house on a street so leafy and isolated it seemed impossible they could still be in the city.
“You know that Vic cursed Dev before he bit it. Probably hit Pea, too.”
“Pea, too,” Tamara said, balefully.
Walter turned to look at her and registered something with a short nod. She felt a jolt of fear; she hadn’t meant to reveal anything. “And her hands still have a mind of their own?”
He knew about that? Had Phyllis told him during one of their early-morning calls on mob business? “They seem to,” she said cautiously.
He raised his eyebrows. “Think they might be connected? The curse and the misbehaving hands?”
“Yeah, it’s occurred to me, Walter.”
“Yet you’re still here instead of there.”
“It won’t do her any good if I’m here or on the moon! She and Dev killed that bastard, not me!”
This time his shrug just smiled. “You really think that Victor’s ghost’ll scram if you walk out on Phyllis?”
Her heart thudded like a snare drum. “I’m not like you. Or Pea. Or Dev, even!”
“Even,” Red Man said mildly. “And yet you sure manage to spend a lot of time with us.”
Tamara thought of that awful story that Dev had wanted her to tell Phyllis, of course she did. She remembered how Dev had looked in the hospital, bandages over his left eye where they’d had to operate. He had made her swear not to tell Phyllis. But she never would have. Pea cared so much about justice, and Tammy was just the snake girl, just the jungle dancer, just a country girl running from the sound of crows in the morning boughs of the hanging tree. What was in her hands but a pair of Greyhound tickets and the stains of all the loves she had been too scared to keep?
“So,” Tamara said, just so she didn’t have to think about it. “You boys found your snitch yet?”
Walter took his time about answering. “I think we have. Nice of you to take an interest in the business, Tammy.”
“Like I keep telling Pea, I’m not in the business. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t do anything to Mrs. Robinson. She doesn’t deserve any of your business practices, Walter.”
Walter smiled softly. Tamara leaned back in her seat. She should have known not to mention this. But she couldn’t stand anyone to have an opinion about how she conducted herself; the faintest sulfurous whiff of it scalded her throat.
“Tammy, tell me, why do you think my ‘practices,’ as you call them, would be so unpleasant for her?”
Tamara swallowed acid. “I’ve heard stories.”
“And you think I would treat a loyal, hard worker like Mrs. Robinson the same way I treat, oh, I can’t imagine—some gangster? Some street runner? A stoolie?”
“I’m not saying you’d … hurt her exactly, but … well, Walter, you have to know your reputation!”
“I know Red Man’s reputation,” he said mildly. “It doesn’t seem that you much object my business practices when they help you, Tammy. Who has been sending you money all these months?”
Tamara clenched her lips shut and didn’t say anything.
“I made a promise to Dev, and I’m going to keep it. Phyllis—” he started, but then, uncharacteristically, stopped himself. He turned around in his seat. “Let’s get inside. I don’t want to keep Miriam waiting.”
“Where the hell are we?” she said.
“Riverdale. I thought you could meet my family.”
She closed her mouth. She had danced in this world long enough to know that a man’s family was separate, sacred. A family was a soft target.
Walter stepped out of the car and she opened her door before he could come around. It was one thing to play chauffeur in Grand Central Station, another to do it in front of his Riverdale mansion, which was a gift she had never thought to receive.
From the outside the house seemed enormous, brick and marble and neoclassical columns framing stained and lead-paneled glass. The inside was marginally less imposing, made warm by mosaic parquet flooring in the foyer and gauzy curtains over the floor-to-ceiling windows. A white woman greeted Tamara effusively as soon as she stepped inside, touching her hand with an ease that shocked her. The woman must be Walter’s wife, she must be, but Tamara couldn’t quite believe a white person so willing to treat with black skin.
“You must be Tamara,” the woman said, going on tiptoe to kiss cheeks. “Walt has told me so much about you.”
Walt. Here the man the Lower East Side knew as Red Man, and not just for his skin, was called Walt. Tamara glanced at him while his wife squeezed her hands with every appearance of delight and his smile was wide and wondering. It transformed him, and she thought, Nice to meet you, Walt.
“Tamara, this is Miriam, my wife. Where are the twins?”
“Playing out back. Should I call them in?”
“No, let them stay. Tamara can meet them at dinner. What’s that I smell?”
“Just some chicken and matzoh balls for the soup. Oh, and kasha and some pickles—I’m sorry, Tamara, do you like kasha? The twins can’t get enough lately, but I won’t feel offended at all if it isn’t to your taste. I do try to keep kosher in the house.”
Walter put his arm around her shoulders, and she seemed as tiny as a doll beside him. “Miriam is the best cook I know,” he said.
“I’m just so happy to meet one of Walt’s work associates,” said Miriam. “He’s always thought so highly of you.”
Tamara could not imagine what Walter had told her about his work or his associates, but she was only being honest when she said she would be delighted to share their table tonight. No wonder he had guarded this space, no wonder he treasured her. Miriam was kind in a way that Walter craved. Maybe because without it, he’d be a monster. Tamara thought about the recent flood of Jewish immigrants from Europe, some of whom she had hosted at the Pelican, and what they said Hitler was doing to the ones who couldn’t get out. She hoped Miriam didn’t have any family back over there.
The children were Chaim and Rachel, eight-year-olds who looked more like each other than either of their parents, though she caught something of Walter in their silent, efficient appraisal as she faced them over dinner.
“So what do you do?” Rachel asked. “Do you negotiate?”
“I book talent and I dance,” Tamara said, before she could hear Miriam’s well-meaning explanation of her husband’s negotiations. “But right now I’m taking care of a friend.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s sick,” Walter said.
“She’s pregnant,” Tamara said.
Rachel grabbed a pickle. “I don’t want to be pregnant. I want to run the business with Daddy.”
“And what does Daddy think?”
“That Rachel and Chaim can be whatever they want,” Walter said, and gave her a faint Red Man smile.
Miriam brought out dessert, a pastry of layered dough and honey topped with pistachios, sickly sweet and unspeakably delicious. As the twins coated their fingers with sticky honey syrup, Tamara found herself reaching for that little handkerchief-wrapped square in her suit jacket pocket. They’d been calling her since that morning, and she felt safer bringing the cards out here, as though they would be reluctant to embarrass her in front of company.
Rachel w
as immediately intrigued. “Are those for betting on poker?” she asked.
Miriam’s smile was just as bright, but it had a wary edge. So she certainly knew something about her husband’s business, then. Tamara shook her head quickly.
“No, these cards aren’t for betting. They’re just for tricks.” And fortunes, but she decided that Miriam wouldn’t likely approve of that, either.
Instead she played simple tricks for the kids: a cut-to-it, half-and-half, and one she called the made-you-look, which involved switching a card they’d already picked by sleight of hand. These were, strangely enough, among the first things Aunt Winnie taught Tamara, when she began her apprenticeship. Learning to make the cards lie is the first step to learning to make them speak, she had said. Tamara had liked that part more than what came after. It had hurt less.
But the cards were playing with her, this time. Chaim and Rachel kept picking out the suicide kings or the ace of spades, no matter how much Tamara feathered and bridged the deck. She kept her expression light, and Miriam seemed delighted, but she wondered if Walter caught a whiff of her panic. Death and death, the cards were saying, we should have been more. You should have done more. You should have saved her. But she wasn’t going back. She’d made her choice.
It was when Rachel picked the king of diamonds again, even though she was sure that she had buried him at the bottom of the deck, that she saw Victor grinning at the head of the long table.
The twins leaned over their plates with the sticky remains of pastry and peered at her.
“Are you sick?” Chaim asked, followed almost immediately by Rachel, more to the point: “Are you pregnant?”
She shook her head. “Thought I saw a bee, that’s all.”
Victor seemed aware of them, but not as focused as before. He directed a few comments to Walter as he reached for a pastry, and his words came to her like rushing water. His expression was amiable, not particularly cruel or angry. He seemed normal, like the man Tammy had tolerated for most of her three years at the Pelican. She had forgotten to be afraid of him by that Christmas Eve two years ago.
Tamara excused herself and went to the washroom. Behind her, Rachel said loudly that she must be pregnant too. Didn’t pregnant women vomit? Her mother hushed her.
She turned on the tap and looked at herself in the mirror.
“Tamara,” she whispered to that red-eyed girl with the puffy cheeks and trembling shoulders, “Tammy, baby, you knew you were making a bargain. You asked around town for the biggest devil to hide under.”
The girl winced. Victor flashed in and out behind her. But he was blurry in the mirror, something closer to her own reflection.
“Tell him what you did, Tammy.” She was doing Pea’s voice, as though she were telling Pea a story.
But it felt like another haunting—a possession—an exorcism.
“That night,” she said, in her own voice again, “I was drunk, and I hadn’t expected it. Victor had seemed nice. There had been some shamus pawing through his office and I’d told him about it. He was in a good mood. But then he wanted to play that stupid game with Dev’s hands. He wanted…”
She choked. The water started to run scalding into the bowl, and clouds of steam put a veil between her and her ghosts.
“Tamara, I’m breaking the door in. Tamara, do you hear me?”
That wasn’t her voice. And it wasn’t a ghost, either. It was Walter smashing the door with his fist, not Victor smashing Dev’s face with a gun.
She turned off the water. Someone whimpered. Dev? No, her, it was her.
“Wait, Walter,” she said, just loud enough for him to hear. She was sweating in the wet heat of that small room. It dripped through her hair, ruining the egg-white slick-back. Victor’s ghost wavered in the steam of the mirror. A blue light was coming up behind him, a blue wind, woodsmoke and ashes, blood and backwoods dirt. It was just as her nana had always said: there beyond the flames, she saw them, the old slaves, then all the others, following: Pete Williams and Little Sammy and Aunt Winnie herself.
“What have you been doing, girl?” she whispered, just as Aunt Winnie might have. The whole line of them opened their mouths and no sound came to her, just flashes of suits and numbers sparking past her eyes with furious velocity.
You use our gift to enrich yourself? You use our gift to hide? Wake up, Oracle! Do you dream of so little? Because we dream of the children, we dream of lifting them up, we dream of changing—
The door burst inward. The lock splintered from the wood and spilled dust on the floor. Walter stood where Victor had been, where her ancestors had gathered with their terrible judgment. It felt as though Tamara were too late. Too late for what? To change, to be better, to be the woman she’d always wanted to be. The ancestors had told her and at last she was ready to listen: it was time.
Walter caught her before she fell.
“Don’t let her die,” she sobbed, “don’t let her die. I’ll do it, I’ll save her, I’ll take the curse.”
Walter was a big man, good to cry on. He took her to his office to get herself together.
He settled into his big leather chair behind the desk. “You asked about the snitch, before.”
She blew her nose, suddenly wary. “You said you found him.”
“We think so. Tell Phyllis that the snitch was giving out information about old kills. Mostly incriminated fellows who are … no longer in the business. If it ends there, we won’t have a problem. The Barkley brothers’ remains were found—an old case. The family was grateful. The police passed along an anonymous donation. From ‘an old friend,’ they said. A cousin is thinking of reopening the bank with those funds. We won’t interfere. You tell her that.”
Tamara stared at him, her thoughts still too choked and sluggish with tears to make sense of his words. The Barkley brothers? Why did that sound familiar?
Phyllis, on the phone, that morning that Tamara had read Dev’s letter. Ordering mob hits in her best white-person voice. Ordering mob hits—or informing on the mob? Old case, Walter said. She hadn’t been ordering a death. She’d been telling the police where to find one of her old kills.
Tamara gasped and gulped before she could properly decide to feign ignorance. She was losing all of her old defenses.
“Don’t,” she stammered, “don’t—don’t—please, Pea is—”
Walter nodded, as though she had confirmed something. She wanted to vomit all over him. “I made a promise to Dev, I told you. I intend to keep it. He wrote to me, you know.”
She drew herself up. She was better than this. She would never again be that empty-headed showgirl who turned her back on cruelty for an illusive safety. “What did he say?”
“You have a heavy weight on your shoulders, and he doesn’t want to add to it. He told me to be kind.” Walter laughed with every appearance of warmth. “Can you imagine? But let’s be honest for a moment, Tamara. No one knows you quite as well as I do, do they? There are moments where kindness is the last thing you need.”
She swallowed the last of her spit. “Like now?”
He spread his hands. “What do you think, Tammy?”
“I have to go back.”
“Good,” he said, “I hoped you’d do that.”
“Why?”
There was a strange light in his eyes, something like the spark when he held his wife and laughed with his children, but shaded by Red Man’s knowing, carefully deployed cruelty.
“You need each other.”
10
Victor wanted to know how much Dev’s hands could tell.
Victor didn’t let them go after Dev stood up to him. He got the gun on Dev, and made Dev touch his skin and then he started saying names. Runners and soldiers Tamara knew, some hatchet boys from other gangs, a few women she didn’t recognize. And after each name he asked Dev if this person or that person was a threat. And if they were, how much. She could tell, Dev’s word was going to execute these people. Of course Dev hated it. He never wanted a part of that
. So he just said no. Every time. He didn’t even pretend.
Tamara stood there, watching. She was terrified, praying with everything in her that she could just disappear. Victor got quiet after a while. He stared hard at Dev and then, appallingly, right at her.
“He’s lying, isn’t he, Tammy? He’s not even trying?”
Tammy closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was still there. Dev and Victor were both looking at her, expecting something, a performance that she couldn’t give.
Victor’s nostrils flared. “You aren’t afraid for your man?”
That was when she realized how she’d gone wrong. She should have started crying, she should have knelt and begged for Dev’s life. Oh, Tamara was sure scared. But as Aunt Winnie could have told her, she was scared of the wrong thing. And maybe Dev knew, because he looked at her wide eyes and said, “Go, Tammy. Leave, I’ll be fine.”
Victor got this funny look, like he was seeing all sorts of things in her he hadn’t bothered to notice before. His voice got flat and hard. “Stay. Answer the question.”
She stayed. Even then she didn’t worry about him hurting her. She didn’t even worry about Dev. She just worried that Victor might not take such good care of her if he got the notion she thought about anything but snake dances and Tuesday-night billing.
She babbled. Tried to say that she didn’t understand, that she didn’t like this game, but Victor cut her off. “Yes or no question? Is your man lying?”
And Lord save her, but she looked him straight in the eye and she said yes.
He looked sad for a moment. Sloppy drunk and sad. She knew she’d done it all wrong. He lowered that gun.
“Maybe you aren’t much of a lady after all, dollface. Not very loyal?”
She knew better than to answer that dangling interrogative, but her mouth kept moving. “I’m plenty loyal, Vic. You know you can trust me.”
Her mouth and her coward’s heart. She wanted Victor’s silver grin more than she wanted Dev’s smile in the morning. Victor just laughed. Dev moved toward her, but Victor kicked him and he fell. Vic should have been too drunk to aim that kick, straight to the ribs. But violence was always one of his talents.
Trouble the Saints Page 31