Tarnished Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  “I’m fine.”

  She takes that with a shrug and says, “Then let’s get down to business. I have information. Information worth paying for.”

  “Is that so?” I take my pack of smokes from my pocket, shake out one for myself, and offer one to Iris, who takes it. That’s when I notice her chipped nail polish, a five-and-dime shade of bright pink. I light the smoke for her, which brings a look of surprise into her eyes, and I get the feeling it’s been a while since anyone’s treated her like a lady. Well, maybe Drogan’s been giving her the princess treatment. Whores tend to bring out his chivalrous side.

  “Listen,” Iris says after a deep drag on the cigarette, the exhaled smoke veiling her face, “word gets around, and the word around the docks today is that Red here’s been asking questions on the quiet about a certain cop. Now, I trust Red. Everybody on the waterfront trusts Red, so I figure I can’t go wrong telling what I know. But a girl’s gotta eat, so after Red and I meet up, I told him I heard your name mentioned in a certain conversation. But sharing that conversation and who did the talkin’ is going to cost: first from him, just for my coming forward—like a service charge, you understand—and then from the interested party, meaning you. So here we are. We’ve been waiting here for you for over an hour.”

  I take another slug of whiskey, then ask Drogan, “How much did she take you for, Red?”

  “Coupla sawbucks. But like she says, a girl’s gotta eat.”

  “You’re quite the businesswoman, Miss Page,” I say. “All right, what’ll this cost me?”

  “Fifty. Up front.”

  “That’s a lot of green for this neighborhood.”

  “Yeah, well, the information’s first rate. The life-or-death type. Your life or death, and I’m not kiddin’.”

  The negotiation just swung in her favor. Iris Page has been negotiating tough deals all her life, and she knows when she’s holding the aces. “Twenty-five up front,” I say, “the rest if I like the information.”

  “How do I know you won’t cheat me for the other half?”

  I pull my wallet from my pocket, take out twenty-five and hand it to her. “I don’t cheat women.”

  She takes the bills as if I’ve just offered her flowers.

  She gets over the sentimental lapse pretty quick and stuffs the cash into her handbag, a black beaded number that isn’t threadbare yet but will be, inside of a year. She snaps the bag shut with the solemnity of someone about to give a death sentence, or maybe hear one. “You can’t ever say you heard this from me,” she says. “I’m dead if it gets around. My skin may not be real sweet anymore, but it’s the only skin I’ve got and I still like walking around in it.”

  “I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

  She nods, takes a drink, swallows it slowly, like maybe the whiskey will stop time, but when it doesn’t after all, she says, “That cop Red’s been asking about is in cahoots with Jimmy Shea.”

  The only reason I don’t fall off my chair is because suddenly I’m clutching the edge of the table, holding it so hard my fingernails dig into the crummy wood. “That’s a helluva statement, Miss Page. Can you back up a thing like that?”

  “Oh, I can back it up,” she says. “I was there when they were talking. Well, sort of there.”

  “What do you mean, sort of there? Either you were there or you weren’t.”

  “It means,” she says with dramatic exaggeration, “that I was in Jimmy’s apartment. In the bathroom, washing up. I, um, well, Jimmy had hired me for the night.” She’s actually embarrassed when she says this, cringing like a schoolgirl who just found out she’s been spied on naked in the girls’ locker room. Embarrassment is out of tune for a working girl, but I guess spending the night with Jimmy Shea could humiliate even the most desperate soul. Iris Page just broke my heart again.

  She takes another swallow of the rotgut to restore her. “Anyway, while I’m in there, in the bathroom—”

  I break in, “Hold it. When was this? What time was this?”

  “Real early this morning, before seven o’clock, maybe a quarter ’til. So while I was in the bathroom, I heard the front doorbell ring. Jimmy was good and annoyed. First of all, the guy was able to come upstairs from the street door, like he broke in or something”—I doubt he’d have to work hard to break in. Jimmy’s as cheap about his living quarters as he is about his tailoring—“and really, what a helluva nerve, showing up at that hour, the crack of dawn. I heard Jimmy grumbling all the way to the door. The bathroom is next to the bedroom, right off the living room, and you have to go through the living room to get to the front door, so you can hear what goes on pretty good in there. Well, Jimmy opens the door and the guy comes in, and boy, did I get an earful.”

  She’s got me and Red wrapped around her little finger and she’s enjoying every bit of our rapt attention, especially Red’s, angling, I guess, for his business, until she remembers that I’m the paying customer at this table. Taking a last drag on her cigarette, she drops it to the floor, stubs it out with the toe of her shabby pink shoe, and shifts her attention to me. “And that’s when your name came up,” she says. “The guy, the one who came in without so much as a good morning, says to Jimmy, I want Cantor Gold. You’re gonna give her to me. The guy has one of those sawtooth voices, the grating kind that could cut you in half. Gave me the creeps, I can tell you. Anyway, then Jimmy says, Who the hell are you? And the guy says, Lieutenant Huber, New York Police Department. And if you don’t want the cops breathing down your neck, Shea, you’ll play ball with me.”

  I should’ve ripped Huber’s face apart when I had the chance back at the precinct. I should’ve killed him. I’d have fried for it, but one less cop, one less sneaky officer of the dirty-playing Law would be around to stalk people.

  I have to quit that daydream and get back to Iris’s story. She says, “And then neither of them says anything for a minute until Jimmy says, How about some coffee, Lieutenant? Come into the kitchen. And that was it. As soon as I hear them go into the kitchen I get myself back to the bedroom. I really wanted to just scram but figured if I run out behind Jimmy’s back he’ll know something’s up, that maybe I got big ears, so I just get back into bed and make like I went back to sleep, like I didn’t hear a thing.”

  Smart girl. “And you’re sure they didn’t know you heard them?”

  “I’m alive aren’t I? Now give me that other twenty-five.”

  *

  Red was happy to make sure Iris got home safely, and Iris was happy to have him take her there. By now, she’s probably got her hands in Red’s pockets—that is, if he’s still wearing his pants.

  I catch an uptown subway at Fulton Street for the ride to the garage where they’re patching up my car. No cabbie is going to pick up a fare sporting a gashed chin, a bloodied lip, and a black-and-blue jaw, except maybe Rosie, but letting Rosie see me in this shape isn’t the best idea right now. She’d mother hen me about my latest injuries. And besides, getting ferried around town by one woman before going out for the evening with another isn’t exactly chivalrous.

  It’s still the early end of the rush hour, barely past four o’clock, so the train’s not too crowded. A few passengers give me the look-over when I step into the car, then turn back to their own business, this being the New York City subway, where odd passengers, even beat-up and bloodied ones, are common as soot. So I settle down in a seat whose woven cane isn’t too torn up and scratchy, between a sweaty guy dozing into the afternoon Journal-American and a middle-aged woman whose attitude is as pinched as her face.

  I nurse my aching jaw as best I can against the subway’s lurch and rattle, settle in for the trip uptown. I used to ride the subway a lot more than I do these days, ride it in from Coney Island as a kid with pennies and nickels in my pockets. Then I’d ride around town like a little big shot with dollars in those same pockets after I’d fenced the stuff that fell out of people’s bags at Coney’s beach. I liked to read the ribbon of ads running the length of the car above
the windows and imagine myself buying some of the stuff, like the fancy whiskeys and the colorful packs of cigarettes, just to impress the pretty women in some of the ads, who in my fevered pubescent imagination would find me suave and irresistible.

  The women in the subway ads are still pretty, and so are the sweeties in the trains’ underground beauty pageant: the monthly winner of the Miss Subways title. The current winner is right above me, a sweet-faced blonde who’s a salesgirl at a stationary store, the sign says, and who likes movies that remind her of her childhood back in Iowa. Not really my type.

  Iris Page might’ve been my type at one time or another, before she hired herself out, got careless about holding on to what must’ve been a sweet soul. All she’s got now is the gut instinct to survive. She knows which tools to use and how to use them. Truth is a tool, and so is a lie. She used a lie on Jimmy Shea this morning by hiding what she overheard. That lie saved her life. She used the truth to get fifty bucks outta me.

  But Jimmy knows how to use those same tools, knows how to use them even better than Iris. Jimmy knows how to twist the truth and polish the lie so that one looks like the other.

  So who’s he lying to? Me, or Huber?

  It hurts my jaw and split lip when I smile, but I can’t help it; I’m smiling. I’m smiling because the bombshell Iris Page just dropped might not explode in my lap after all but in Huber’s lap, and that would make me grin from ear to ear.

  *

  The guy did a good job on my car, cleaned her up and polished her good as new. There’s no trace of blood or brains or broken glass, nothing to catch the eye of the garage attendant in my apartment building when I drive in. And if my car looks its usual spiffy self to Sam, who notices even the smallest thing about a tenant’s car that’ll earn him a few bucks for a wax job, it’ll look good enough to ferry the very classy Vivienne Parkhurst Trent.

  But even a hot shower and dressing in the smooth threads of my black trousers and white dinner jacket can’t polish up the violence that’s been carved into my face. The old scars just keep getting more company.

  Chapter Eight

  Vivienne’s butler George is less annoyed at seeing me at eight o’clock this evening than he was at three o’clock this morning. Instead of rumpled pajamas, he’s his impeccable self in his butler’s finest, tailcoat and all, when he opens that spooky carved door of the mansion and lets me in. “You may wait in the living room,” he says. “Miss Trent will be down directly.”

  So it’s once more along the checkered marble floor and past the Renaissance treasures that line the hall. A minute later, I’m back in the living room and on the sofa.

  I light a smoke. That first deep, satisfying inhale does a good job of calming the body, but it can’t chase away the horrors clawing around in my mind. Thoughts of Hannah Jacobson, cut up. Marcus Stern, blown to bits. That piece of shit Huber smacking me around. This isn’t a state of mind I want to show Vivienne. I’ve got to play her smooth so she’s easy in my company when we’re at Max Hagen’s tonight. If Vivienne doesn’t play along, Hagen could dummy up about any possible leads to the stolen Dürer, and without that lead, I’m stuck between the long, hulking shadows of the Mob and the Law.

  So I get up and pour myself a Chivas at the small bar behind the sofa, hoping the good whiskey will work its magic and improve my mood. A swallow or two helps a little, helps me put on an easy face—my suave act, as Drogan calls it—when Vivienne swooshes into the room in a swirl of black silk, ruby jewels, and a red lipstick that begs to be smeared in the dark. She’s very classy. She’s very sexy. And she’s no fool. “What’s wrong, Cantor? I haven’t seen you look this miserable since…I mean—”

  “You mean since Sophie disappeared.”

  “Yes, well—yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to reopen such a painful subject.”

  “Skip it.”

  “Of course. But you do look like you’ve been chewed up.”

  Bringing up Sophie doesn’t help my disposition, but then Vivienne lifts her fingers to my battered face, strokes my wounds, and looks at me through those big green eyes of hers as if I’m an orphaned pup. “You’ve had a tough day,” she says. Her touch doesn’t take the hurt away; it even makes each cut and bruise hurt more. But it’s a sublime pain.

  And then it’s gone. Her fingers are gone from my face. The tenderness in her eyes simmers into something darker, a deep green that lures like an open cave. Softly, in almost a whisper, she says, “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

  “What’s your pleasure?”

  “Bourbon, with a splash of soda. But make it a short one. We really should be going.”

  I hand her the drink. Her red nail polish glints in the lamplight as she wraps her fingers around the glass. And then, in a manner that’s at the heart of Vivienne’s charm, that blend of ladylike class and the ancestral gutter streak at her core, she downs the drink in one pull. Putting the empty glass on the bar, she says, “Shall we go?”

  I take her arm, chivalrous to my core, and escort her out of the living room.

  George is waiting for us at the front door. He has Vivienne’s black silk clutch bag and her evening coat, a deep purple number he’s holding at the ready.

  “Please give my coat to Cantor, George,” she says. “She’ll help me on with it.”

  Obedient at the bidding of his mistress, he hands me the coat.

  I slip the coat along Vivienne’s arms and settle it on her shoulders. The whisper of the silk lining against her skin is as seductive as breath in my ear. I’m having a helluva time reminding myself that tonight is a business date.

  Vivienne takes her clutch bag. George opens the door. As we walk through, Vivienne doesn’t wait for me to take her arm; she slips her arm through mine.

  I don’t know if it’s because a streetlight has caught the white of my dinner jacket, but in any event, I’m glowing.

  *

  Max Hagen doesn’t have a butler. He has a maid. She takes Vivienne’s coat when we arrive.

  Hagen’s apartment is everything you’d expect an art connoisseur’s Park Avenue apartment to be: big, impeccably furnished in well-chosen historic periods if heavy on the fussiness of French Baroque, the lighting carefully arranged to show off all the good art on walls the color of old blood. The walls throw a weird red tinge around the edges of the Baroque picture frames.

  Most of the paintings have the muted luster of the Renaissance masters, Hagen’s specialty at the Pauling-Barnett auction house. Scattered among the Dutch and Italian landscapes, there’s an elegant Mannerist Madonna by Parmigianino, with the artist’s typical taste for a Madonna who’s more fashion mannequin than Holy Mother; a couple of Frans Hals’s cheery, red-faced drunks to give the living room a party mood; a Rembrandt biblical scene to keep Hals’s revelers from getting out of line; and a Holbein portrait of an English nobleman in full sepia regalia, a filigreed gold and ruby sash stretched across his fur-trimmed cloak. I wonder if the guy is one of Hagen’s ancestors or if Hagen just wishes he is. Maybe Hagen gathers high-quality antique ancestors the way he gathers pricey antique frames and furniture.

  Hagen’s guests are as well appointed as the Holbein nobleman, the men in perfectly tailored tuxedos or dinner jackets, the women in colorful silks and satins, jewels swaying on their well-tended flesh. All in all, between the priceless art, the treasury of jewels, and the bank accounts of the guests, there’s enough money in this room to buy a reasonably sized museum or a small country, say, Luxembourg.

  A cultured male voice, deep and smooth as warm syrup, rolls toward us through the refined chatter of guests and the tinkling of cocktail glasses. “My dear Vivienne, I’m delighted you could make it.” The voice belongs to the approaching figure of a tall, elegantly attired and groomed man whose white dinner jacket shimmers in the light of each lamp he passes, and whose carefully trimmed mustache sits on his lip with the perfection of two delicate brushstrokes. His blue eyes are impish and steely at the same time, giving him the air of a fun-
loving aristocrat with a murderous streak. It’s our host, Max Hagen.

  He and Vivienne exchange suavely Continental greetings—a light kiss on each cheek—and then Hagen extends his hand to me, buddy fashion. “And you must be Cantor Gold,” he says. His apparent comfort with me is surprising. Well, maybe not so surprising: there’s a svelte young man nearby, dark haired and pretty in his close-fitting black tuxedo, who’s looking at Hagen with an expression I’ve seen in the eyes of some of the more impatient women I’ve dated.

  Well, well.

  Hagen, the perfect host, says as he moves between us and takes Vivienne’s arm and mine, “I’m sure you both need a drink. Come, let’s move to the bar,” and leads us across the living room. The svelte young man watches us but keeps his distance.

  After the hired bartender fixes us up with a bourbon and soda for Vivienne, a martini for Hagen, and a neat scotch for me, Hagen says, “Forgive me for mentioning it, Gold, but you look as if you’ve been in some sort of accident. Are you quite all right?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  Vivienne, with a nod toward the pretty young man with the impatient eyes, says through a sly smile, “You know, Max, you’re really ignoring Vern, and he doesn’t look at all happy about it.”

  “He’ll just have to get over it. He shouldn’t even be here, and he knows it. This is a working evening for me. My guests are clients of Pauling-Barnett. Really, sometimes that boy has no discretion. I’m sure Gold understands.”

  Dry as sandpaper on stone, I say, “Sure, I understand.”

  Hagen ignores that, just says, “As a matter of fact, we should move to somewhere more private. You’re attracting the wrong kind of attention, Gold. Let’s go into my study, shall we? Come along, and please bring your drinks.”