by Lee Thomas
With no other skills, Butch had joined Cal Lawrence’s Vaudeville Extravaganza and performed exhibitions and feats of strength under the name “Ivan Borgia.” He couldn’t use his own name because the promoters had their fingers in the Vaudeville pie as well. Since he wasn’t a headliner, no one saw his face until he came on the stage. He’d grown a thick beard and cut his hair to the scalp, and the disguise must have done the trick, because no one had blinked or said boo. Those days had been good, if not satisfying. He’d had money and security and he’d made friends among the entertainers, and had taken up with a singer named Mildred Olin. He could have made a decent future in the traveling shows, except he couldn’t put aside his past. On more than one occasion, his sparring partners complained of rough treatment.
It was just a show after all.
It all went sour one afternoon, when during a matinee, Butch grew frustrated with a townie, hired for the weeklong booking. The man was not a wrestler by any definition. He threw illegal moves—kicks and punches—night after night, and Butch took it all in stride, because the man’s bulk was showy, but there was little muscle beneath his layers of flab. His punches struck powerlessly, but on that afternoon, the townie landed knuckles to Butch’s Adam’s apple, causing him to choke. The townie ass pranced around the stage like he’d done something heroic, and Butch’s temper boiled thick and dark, like molasses.
He grabbed the townie and hoisted him toward the lights. The man squealed and threatened and slapped the air as Butch held him like a trophy overhead. Then Butch carried the man to the edge of the mats and slammed him to the wooden stage, where he lay motionless on the boards. Ultimately the man recovered, but Butch was fired on the spot. He left that night while Mildred was on stage. Too angry to offer any kind of civil farewell he wrote her a letter after he settled in with Mack Mack McCauley, but he never heard back from her.
Then Powell. Then Musante. Now the train.
Butch closed his eyes, eager to reach New Orleans. He was due a break, and he had to believe one waited at the end of the line.
Chapter 7
Dancing in the Attic
“Do you visit often?” the girl in the crisp white uniform asked.
“What else would I be doing?” Paul Rabin replied warmly.
His wife lay on the bed before him. In the morning sun her skin more resembled an accumulation of dust than tissue, kin to the motes that swam in the buttery light bathing her face and neck. He’d insisted on a room that gave Irene morning sun; she loved it so. He touched the back of his hand to the dry skin of her brow and stroked gently. “She’s all I know.”
“How long have you two been married?” the girl asked.
“She was sixteen, and I was twenty,” Rabin said, “and the century had just begun, and we felt certain it would be our century, so we had a wedding and a honeymoon, and we expected a hundred years of bliss.” He chuckled without mirth. “We were children. Foolish romantic children. And here it is only a third of the way into the century, and we’re hardly there at all anymore.”
The nurse’s face softened with sympathy or envy or the offspring of both. Tears pooled on the lower lids of her eyes. “Do you have children?”
“We weren’t so blessed,” Rabin said. He grasped Irene’s hand lightly and bent to press his lips to her fingers and wished the nurse would leave him alone—leave them alone—because he found the timbre of the nurse’s voice abrasive, and he preferred his mornings with Irene to be uninterrupted. Peaceful. He understood that the girl was new and eager to show interest in her patients and the families of her patients, and she’d probably learned this behavior in a college course that stressed the importance of such interactions. The nurse wouldn’t realize her peskiness, so Rabin considered addressing it. Most mornings he arrived with his newspaper and a thermos of black coffee and he perused the Tribune and read certain passages aloud if he thought Irene would find them interesting, and sometimes she’d ask him to read the passage again because she liked the way his voice sounded pronouncing certain words. Of course, she wouldn’t ask him to repeat anything this morning as she’d had a difficult evening. The hospital handled her difficult evenings with drugs, enough to keep Irene sleeping entire days.
Raving, the doctor had said. Striking out. One orderly had commented sourly that Irene had even managed to scratch a poor nurse’s cheek.
That’s my good girl, Rabin thought. Don’t you take any of their guff.
Irene’s official diagnosis was pre-senile dementia. It sounded ugly to Rabin. He preferred the name Dr. Kenfold used. Kenfold was one of the younger doctors who spoke in long, technical sentences as if constantly quoting from a psychiatry journal. He called the illness, Alzheimer’s, named for a German who’d studied the condition extensively. Unfortunately, Alzheimer had done a wonderful job in identifying symptoms, but he’d done nothing in the way of curing the affliction. Mental capacities diminished. The brain dissolved. The patient died, lost in a stew of disjointed sensations, words, and images.
Rabin could imagine little worse in the way of fate. The idea of losing his faculties, losing control, made his neck perspire.
On the table, beside the window, Rabin noticed the vase of flowers he’d brought on his last visit. The carnations were looking wilted. Sad. Usually they lasted through the week. He stepped closer to the table and reached out a finger, drawing a line in the light film of dust that had gathered on the top.
“I’m sure tonight will be much better for her, Mr. Rabin.”
“Oh, I have no doubt,” he replied. “Her spells come and go. No harm.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rabin grasped the vase and lifted it. “It’s a shame how they wither,” he said. “The beautiful things never last long enough to overstay their welcome.”
“I can take those…”
Before the nurse could finish her sentence, Rabin released the vase, fumbling after it as if the act were the result of clumsiness, rather than a premeditated act of destruction. The nurse gasped in harmony with the shattering glass. Rabin hopped back and regarded the mess with an expression of dismay.
“What have I done?” he asked.
The nurse rushed forward. “I’ll get that. Please. Let me.”
“No. No. No.” Rabin said, kneeling down to begin retrieving pieces of the broken vase.
Then the nurse was next to him, insisting that he let her clean up the mess—such a helpful girl. Like Rabin she carefully pinched her fingers on the smooth shards, cautious of the jagged edges. She picked with one hand and stacked the glass in the other. Rabin waited until he had her rhythm in his head and then went for a particularly thin shard. He snatched it and pulled the sliver upward, drawing a cut along the back of the nurse’s hand. It was shallow, hardly wider than a tack point. The nurse squealed and jerked her hand away.
“I’m so sorry,” Rabin said, but every muscle in his body sighed with satisfaction.
Then the nurse was assuring him it was nothing and insisting he let her finish with the mess, and she hurried from the room, allowing Rabin the opportunity to smile, and when she returned with an orderly, who held a broom, Rabin apologized profusely and the nurse waved his concern away, and then the glass and dead carnations were swept into a pan, and the orderly sopped up the water with a rag and told Rabin to watch his step. The orderly made a hasty retreat with the debris, and yet the nurse remained.
“You should have that cut looked at,” Rabin said. “I feel just terribly about this whole situation.”
“It’s barely a scratch, but I should at least daub it with iodine.”
“You do that,” Rabin said. “And thank you so very much. You’ve made my visit particularly pleasant.”
The girl smiled and bent at the knees in an odd and completely unnecessary curtsy, as if he were a suitor at a cotillion, and after she left, he stood by the window and shook his head, wondering exactly what her performance was meant to mean. A curtsy? Really? What must be going through that child’s mind?
Once Rabin felt certain the nurse had made her way to the next victim of her curiosity, he pulled a chair to Irene’s bedside and unfolded his paper, and he read her the headline about a missing schoolgirl, and the story about the wrestler who had murdered a man named Musante and was successfully eluding capture, and he read her the article about the World’s Fair which would be infesting the city, and he read her the latest developments in the Al Capone trial and he thought he saw his wife’s lip twitch upward when he mentioned the gangster’s name, and he smiled, because Irene had often said the man looked like a gorged toad. She felt certain some sly fox would gobble him up in due time.
Like so many people, she believed in justice. Radio dramas. Picture show fluffs. Biblical passages. These were the sources of Irene’s comfort, just as they comforted the millions who wagged their fingers and shook their heads and said, “He’ll get his,” when learning about some new perpetrator of atrocity. So ingrained was the desperation the reverends called “hope” it castrated men and further mollified women to the point only a handful of truly depraved men ever saw justice. Those that did became not only infamous for their crimes, but also false icons that suggested justice existed, that it reigned, when in fact every villain in custody had a hundred counterparts left untouched, roaming the world and spreading their gospel. The convicted were the exceptions to the rule; and they proved nothing.
Rabin thought the belief in justice was the belief that someone else would handle the bad men. Yet another opiate of the masses. It was simple logic really—all very Darwin to Rabin’s mind. The bad men were the fittest, inclined toward greed, deceit, and violence. The fit survived, and the fit were not concerned with hope beyond the proliferation of hope in others. Hope made sheep and sheep were for fleecing and for eating.
“And the president is certain we’ll be seeing an upturn in the economy in no time at all,” he said to his unconscious wife. “I’d say it’s about time,” he added.
He read through the sports page and amid the scores he found a notice for a wrestling exhibition, and he thought of the wrestler, William Cardinal known to fans as “The Butcher.” He returned to page three of the paper and looked over the story a second time. He winced upon reading the name Curtis Conrad, one of the detectives investigating the crime. He knew the man. At least he knew enough about him to dislike him intensely. After gathering what information he could from the piece, he studied the accompanying photo. The picture was old and in it William Cardinal had struck a common pose for one in his line of performance: arms out, knees bent, face attentive as if expecting attack from any side. Well-muscled. Intimidating in a brutish way. Rabin looked closely at the dots that made up the lines and shadows of Cardinal’s face, and he squinted at the image and leaned back. After lowering the paper to his lap, he offered his peaceful wife a soft smile.
“This one looks like he’d fight back.”
Rabin returned to reading the paper, putting William Cardinal out of his mind for a time. When he finished the news he kissed Irene’s brow and held her hand before excusing himself. Quietly, he slipped the paper into the pocket of his overcoat and retrieved his thermos of coffee, which had gone untouched because the curious nurse had disturbed his morning ritual. He gave Irene a last wave and exited into the hall, where he said, “Good day,” to the various members of the staff charged with caring for his wife.
Outside, he pulled his muffler tight to his throat and shivered. The snow had ended the night before, leaving the world white and bitter. Glare hit his eyes like acid and he made a visor of his gloved hand as he walked to his car. He drove home slowly, not because the icy roads concerned him, but because the other drivers on the road were, generally speaking, idiots. He thought about Irene and the lies her doctors had told him: lies about her condition improving, about her being able to come home soon. Though he wanted to believe their prognoses he wasn’t a fool. He’d never been a victim of hope. As he understood it, Alzheimer’s was a progressive and devouring disease, and even if she were to accompany him home, she would be back in the sanitarium’s care only days later, because that’s what it had come to, because that’s how the world worked, because life was a series of random inequities, made tolerable for some by their gods and for others by illusions of control.
He loved Irene. She was the only human being he’d ever been capable of loving—if he understood the term correctly—but the toys in her attic had gotten the rhythm in their feet, and they’d started to dance, and nothing was going to settle them down until the music stopped once and for all.
A car idled at the curb in front of his house. Upon recognizing the vehicle a tingle singed his chest, not for the visitor, or course, because he loathed the man, but because he understood that the man only visited his home with exciting news.
Rabin pulled into the drive and leaned to the glove box, from which he retrieved an ice pick. He slid it into his breast pocket. He left the thermos on the floor and stepped out of the car before crossing to the idling Police Flyer and climbing into the passenger seat. The driver was obese, unshaven and reeked of cabbage, bad gin, and old sweat. The disgusting man’s only concession to vanity was a narrow, well-groomed mustache, like a neat and perfect line drawn across a mound of excrement.
“Detective Conrad,” Rabin said.
“We have a job for you,” Conrad said, and then sniffled loudly.
“And by we do you mean the fine men of the Chicago Police Department?”
“Don’t crack wise,” Conrad said. He sneezed and drew the sleeve of his overcoat across his nose, collecting a broad glistening trail on the already stained wool. “I’m here for Impelliteri.”
A cog turned in Rabin’s mind, and he said, “This is about that wrestling fellow.”
“How’d you know that?”
“I read the paper.”
Conrad grunted. Nodded. “Butch Cardinal. We lost him. Your guys and my guys. I don’t know how he slipped but he did it. He might’ve gotten out of town. We don’t know, so Impelliteri wants you to find him and do whatever the fuck it is you do.”
Rabin sat in the car, enduring the stench of the detective, listening to the plan that had failed and the steps his employer was taking to correct that failure. Rabin thought it providence that he should have considered Cardinal such an interesting opponent, only to have the opportunity to find out firsthand dropped in his lap. Near the end of their conversation Detective Conrad mentioned an item of interest, a trinket Rabin was to recover for his employer, but the details were, at best, vague.
“How am I to know what the item is if I don’t know what I’m looking for?”
“Well, it’s not like I’ve got a picture of it. It’s a necklace, and it doesn’t sound like shit to me, but Impelliteri wants it. He said it looks like a squashed rose. Cardinal probably won’t be carrying too much jewelry, so it shouldn’t be all that tough to figure out.”
“Indeed,” Rabin said. “Is this item of sentimental value to Mr. Impelliteri?”
“Does Impelliteri strike you as sentimental?”
“Remarkably on point,” Rabin noted.
“Just don’t come back without it.”
Conrad slapped his fat hand down on a wide envelope. “We got what we could about Cardinal in here. Didn’t do us a shitload of good, but you seem to have your ways. Everything we know about him is in here. Plus your retaining fee, of course.”
Rabin lifted the package and asked, “Officer Conrad, how much of a commission did you remove from this envelope before I arrived home?”
Conrad sneered and shook his head like the question was an inconvenience rather than an insult. “Delivery charge,” he said.
Rabin considered the ice pick in his pocket. His heart beat against its handle. Killing the detective would only take a second. It would feel so very good. But it would complicate things with his primary employer. Maybe another day.
“Have a fine day, Officer,” Rabin said. He let himself out of the car and frowned. Despite enjoying the noti
on of a new project to keep him busy, the detective’s visit, like the earlier imposition of Irene’s nurse, had soured his morning.
Rabin returned to his own car to retrieve the thermos of coffee before walking up the stairs to his home. He quickly unlocked the front door and entered. After securing the three bolts to lock himself in, he paused to enjoy the comfortable surroundings. He’d stoked the furnace before leaving to visit Irene, and the heat wrapped around him like a blanket. His breakfast of bacon and fried tomatoes still scented the air. If he closed his eyes and pretended, he could imagine hearing Irene in the parlor, could hear the clicking of her knitting needles as she made a sweater for one of the unfortunate children at St. Michael’s. With her gone such dreams were all that remained, and sadly the illusion couldn’t last.
Rabin had to clean up some old business before he began his new assignment.
“Sooner than later,” he whispered, and then he opened the basement door to descend the stairs.
Much cooler than the rest of the house, the basement nonetheless brought pleasures of its own. To his right was a broad alcove he’d made into an office. Here he had a small rolltop desk and a comfortable wingback chair for contemplation and reading. Rabin placed the pick on the desk and began unbuttoning his vest. He removed his coat and vest; his money clip, cufflinks, and studs went into a fine china saucer on the desktop.
After rolling up his sleeves, Rabin closed his eyes and breathed deeply, letting his mind drift, waiting for serenity to welcome him. He’d learned the meditative technique from a palm reader on Clark Street, and though her talent to see the future was decidedly in question, Rabin had found her relaxation regimen thoroughly effective.
Now peaceful, Rabin opened his eyes and retrieved the ice pick from the bench. He turned to face the center of the room, where muffled sounds called to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’ve been called away on business.”