Whitey. Johnny. Tim. Waxey. Meyer, the one with the birthmark-stained cheek. They shook hands all around.
“So who do you pay for this dump?”
“When we pay!” Whitey put in.
A wineskin came out, and a bottle wrapped in burlap.
“Let ‘em suck blood outta somebody else’s neck,” Waxey threatened.
“Well, c’mon, when they finally get ahold of you,” Max joined in, “who sticks his hand in your pocket?”
“Suckass landlord, who the hell else?” Whitey said.
“His name, her name, who is it?” Max persisted.
“Corky picks our pocket. Name’s Corky,” Meyer explained.
“You know his first name? And where his office is?”
“Mike Corchoran. Next to the Chink laundry on Hudson.” Meyer looked at Max askance, as if he didn’t know where the center of the universe was located.
“You ever hear of a Mrs. Edwards? Or Miss Van Siclen?”
“The Edwards takes it lying down, or the one takes it off the wall?” Johnny inquired.
“Nah, he’s just chewing your ear. Mikey Corchoran’s the one,” Whitey assured him.
“What’s your name again, mister? You wanna see one for the books?” Meyer asked.
Max dug out his last few coins and slapped them in Meyer’s palm. “Sure, I’m game.”
“Foller me. Touch yer fingers to the walls when we get there,” he added, cryptically.
Meyer led him through an alley and out into a flooded courtyard. A lively girl was yanking at the pump. Max took a good look at the brown water that was spurting into her pail.
“No water in this building?”
“We’re just on the second floor,” she said, a shy smile on her face.
“This way,” Meyer urged him, disappearing down the cellar stairs.
He sloshed after his guide, tensing in case the man tried to roll him. A character like Meyer was as weak as a kitten, he figured. He’d go down fast if you caught him with one good uppercut.
Following close, he stepped into pure darkness. Wobbling, he groped for the wall. His hand found moist stone. An ancient chill pervaded the pitch-black basement.
“I gotta save the candle. This way,” Meyer urged him.
Now he wasn’t so sure he could defend himself. Who knew which direction the shot-weighted sap was coming from? Then he heard the snoring. There were multiple notes. Low wheezes. Musical sinuses. Trumpet blares from slack throats. Full chords on organs of fleshy pipes.
He smelled the musk of human beings in close quarters. Gagging, he dug into his pocket for a handkerchief.
Meyer lit his nub of a candle. “These is only sleepin’ it off. At night there’s a dozen, easy, in here.”
At best, the chamber was no more than six by ten.
In the guttering flame Max beheld the human pile. Lying across one another on deflated mattress ticking, the sleeping men formed a single wheezing body. A bearded face was embedded in an anonymous thigh, a hand sprouted between tangled legs, bare feet seemed to grow from a throat. In a rattle of phlegm, the mound exhaled as one. He had seen derelicts frozen to death, their features skinned with ice, and watched floaters hooked from the Hudson by the harbor police, but there was something about this many-armed, many-legged heap of human beings that outdid those horrors. Perhaps because it was still alive.
“So how much do they have to cough up?” he inquired.
“Nickel a night. Beats Happy Jack’s Canvas Palace.”
“By two cents, last I looked.”
“Yeah, but most of the times Mike the Cork keeps it dry in here,” Meyer observed before killing the candle with his thumb.
chapter twenty-six
Max was no stranger to the tenements. He’d grown up in one, and his mother, that whirling dervish, was still cleaning another out and dreaming of owning it one day. Fifth Avenue reformers might have regarded Max’s childhood home as a slum, but it wasn’t that bad at all. He didn’t have to haul water upstairs from a pump, there was a toilet on his floor, and the halls were scrubbed down every other day. Mr. Brodsky, the owner, prided himself on whitewashing every three years, and he looked down on those cockroach landlords who resorted to three-month paint, a flaking concoction that had a habit of bursting into flames while still wet. Max’s family of four shared three rooms while his friends were jammed into identical apartments with five or six brothers and sisters, and a boarder to boot. As a boy, he believed he was from a better class.
Tenement life seemed normal to him. More than half of Manhattan was jam-packed with apartment buildings. The worst, usually rear tenements, often had nothing but a single outdoor privy and a single water pump to serve all the tenants. On his own block, apartment houses of this lower order were scattered among the more habitable dwellings.
The Burnt Pot, for instance, had been condemned in 1864 but continued to thrive. It couldn’t burn down, the story ran, because its walls were nothing but dirt itself. Then there was the Shipwreck, a listing three-story rookery that housed a baker, a fishmonger, and twelve families. A single sink in the basement served for wetting down dough, scaling cod, and urinating. Max knew all about it because his Shipwreck buddies loved to let loose in this sink as a form of recreation and revenge. The adults who relieved themselves in it had more prosaic needs.
On his block, some buildings hadn’t been painted in decades; others were slathered rust-red every five years. Some stayed stone-cold all winter; others kept their furnaces just warm enough. When he walked down a block, he habitually picked out the pariahs, the half-gutted, the teeming hives, and the piles of sticks so far gone even vagrants avoided them. But these disasters stood out among, by his standards, the other more or less habitable dwellings.
Where the unpracticed eye might see identical run-down shops, Max could discern which store sold rotten vegetables and which one had a better stock; he could tell where to buy a fresh chicken and where the milk swarmed with too much life; he could sniff out which joint tapped a decent beer, and which dive served the drippings from a hundred barrels.
Mrs. Edwards’s property—or Moriarity’s or Mikey Corchoran’s—reminded him of the Burnt Pot. Her buildings loomed like Untouchables on the Hindoo continent. Max had no beef with landlords in general, and he had mixed feelings about the derelicts in the human pile—how could anybody let himself sink that low?—but no one deserved to live in complete ruins. There were complicated political theories that explained these things, but he sensed without putting it into words that there was a line, however unclear, between making a dollar and committing a crime.
He was slightly embarrassed to find that he had such feelings, and he certainly intended to keep them to himself. But whoever owned the hundreds of properties listed in the Midnight Band’s ledger ought to be dragged into the light of day. It would make a pretty story. Why shouldn’t he be the one to tell it?
On Thursday morning, he batded the light. When it struck him flush on the eyelids, he mashed a pillow over his face. When it reflected off the mirror, he dove deep down under the covers. When he emerged from his hiding place later on, tangled in his bedclothes, his mouth agape, the terrible brightness was too much, and he scuttled back into his cave. He had to get to work, but he’d never been so worn out. He heard someone calling his name, heels tapping on the stairs, breakfast’s clatter, but he blocked it all out, sinking back into a delicious swoon.
When he crawled back to consciousness, Mrs. DeVogt’s boarding house was shrouded in silence. He lay there a long time, luxuriating in a warm daze.
“Are you decent?” Belle shouted from the other side of his door.
Her penetrating voice shook him awake. “That’s a matter of opinion,” he called back. “What time is it?”
Backing into the room with a tray in her arms, she said, “Cover yourself. It’s eleven-thirty.”
The office! Hell, he wasn’t on deadline. Sitting up, still bleary-eyed, he took in the way her hair curled at the nape of her n
eck, her slender back, her elegant figure. Her crisp skirts rustled as she came around his bed. “It’s so quiet. Where’s the rest of the zoo?”
“They all flew the coop. Here, coffee and rolls. Mrs. DeVogt fed your eggs to the cat.”
He sipped the coffee, wondering where she would sit down. The edge of the bed would make her handy. His hopes were dashed when she turned and chose the Morris chair. Her feet barely touched the ground. He was so busy trying to catch a glimpse of her ankles that her pallor and her red-rimmed eyes barely registered.
“This is smashing, thanks. Ahh, you remembered the jam too.”
“Mrs. DeVogt’s preserves,” she said in a constricted voice.
He smeared the sweet fruit all over his roll. “Peach?”
“Something happened,” she began.
Her blood-drained face struck him now, and he realized she’d been crying. “What’s going on?”
“I have a confession to make.”
“Let me grab my collar.”
“It’s not funny. I stayed home from work. Faye’s in jail.”
“What?” He leaped out of bed, his legs shooting out from beneath his nightshirt. “What? What for?”
“We were shopping.…” She averted her eyes from his exposed knees, but not before noticing how sturdy they looked.
Quickly, his terror subsided. He knew exactly what his sister had been up to again. “She got pinched? Where? Macy’s? McCreery’s?”
“Stern’s, but it was my fault entirely—”
“I doubt it. Faye had the light fingers long before she ever laid on eyes on you.” Along with a few more questionable habits best left unmentioned. He was irritated but relieved all at once. At least his sister hadn’t stuck a fork in some stage manager’s eye. Damn her! She didn’t care if she ate up his only day off.
“It was my idea, I was showing her… .” If her father ever found out, she’d die of shame. Jake would use it like a lash against her. And didn’t she deserve it? Who could be a bigger hypocrite? She always swore to herself she’d never succumb again, but the scarf’s fabric was so rich, and the store was spraying that perfume that made her head spin, and the Stern Brothers were swimming in gelt and who was watching anyway?
“Since she was about six,” he went on, shaking his head and laughing out loud. “Just tell me which jug she’s in, and I’ll go get her. They’ve probably stashed her over at the Jefferson Courthouse, huh?”
Belle’s face grew hot. Thoughtlessly, she twirled a strand of hair around her index finger. “You’re not listening! It was my idea to show her the gloves and … anyway, she’s the one who got caught.”
Finally, he grasped the whole situation. Belle the crusader had a dash of thievery in her, too. The difference between her and Faye was obvious, though. Belle was in agony. Faye, in the clink, would be cursing herself for getting caught.
“You’ve got the fever, too? That’s a shocker.”
Straightening her back, she stiffened, and a new note crept into her voice. “Well, you read every day about doctor so-and-so’s wife and how she didn’t know what she was doing or she has a woman’s disease. The ladies have kleptomania. The shopgirls they send to jail.”
She knew what she was talking about. Faye needed the white lace gloves for her wedding, they looked darling, but how could an actress afford them? She didn’t have money to burn like some people; but with all her talent, didn’t she deserve a few nice things? Then that miserable store detective with booze on his breath and pot-roast stains on his vest, he should have been ashamed of himself.
Her own shame was a chill, a spasm that radiated from her stomach down her legs. She pressed her knees together.
“You’re right about that. Oh, damn it. I’m short. You wouldn’t have ten dollars on you ‘til tomorrow, would you?” Max asked.
“Ten dollars? What for?” Jake might berate her, but he wouldn’t take a cent from her. With Max, she was a little wary. Anyway, ten dollars was a fortune. Where did he get off asking for so much?
“You don’t want her to rot over at Jefferson, do you? We’ve got to spring her now.” Whistling under his breath, he poured water into the porcelain basin and soaped his hands.
She couldn’t get over it. He seemed positively cheerful. In fact, he hadn’t lectured her. He didn’t seem to take her humiliation seriously. She thought less of him than ever, and liked him more. Look at the way he was showing off his legs in his skimpy nightshirt, proud of his muscular calves and tapering ankles, casual and brazen all at once.
“I’ll see what I have,” she agreed. On the one hand, she didn’t want to face Faye; on the other, she didn’t want Max to go off on his own and make too free with her money. “I’ll go with you.”
Stretching, he arched his back and yawned. From under his sleeves his whipcord forearms slid out. “Why not?”
He splashed cold water on his face and rubbed it with a fresh towel. The terrycloth smelled clean, the soft material soothing against his skin. He was coming back to life. Looking up, he caught her staring. For a heartbeat she held his gaze before catching her breath and glancing away.
Her waist was so tiny. He could feel his fingers unlacing her, the smooth silk panels of her corset, the sweet thrill of her breasts pressed against his naked chest.
“I’ll get my purse,” she said, starting for the door.
When he held out his arm she curled into him and they were kissing, breathless, in a blur. Her tongue darted into his mouth, and he realized that she knew more than he had expected. Without thinking, he lifted her, stroking her hair, nuzzling her ear, kissing her throat. He was lost now, more mindless electricity than man. When she slipped her hands under his shirt, he thought he might die. Her fingers stroked his chest and then, to his amazement, worked their way down his taut body.
He was thicker than Jake. Pulsing in her palm, his erection felt hard yet strangely delicate. His whiskers rubbed her cheeks raw. She felt her courage surging back, the nerve to surrender to heat and nothingness. She snaked out of his arms and turned her back. “Quick, help me,” she whispered. His dumb fingers tugged at the buttons, finally freeing one, then the next and the next until she could bend down and draw the silk dress straight over her head.
Unable to speak, he groped to hook the door. He felt drunk as he freed her, eyehole by eyehole, from her restraining garment, intoxicated in the flooding light. When she stepped out of her corset, sunlight penetrated her white camisole, and he could see the outline of her whole body, his heart beating madly against his ribs. Then she was holding his gaze, steady and defiant as he lifted the hem of her chemise and pulled it up to reveal her slender legs, her black-haired crotch, her outflowering hips, her dark-nippled breasts in the plain sunlight.
An obsidian necklace, her single adornment, gleamed dark around her throat. He cupped her breasts gently in his hands. Leaning over, he kissed the velvety mole on her face.
In a rush, he tore off his nightshirt and stood naked before her. A white knotted scar stood out on his shoulder. His swelling chest was covered with wiry hair, but not too much, she thought; and the way he stood, his square chin up, his legs apart, his erection quivering, engorged, made her feel faint. She pressed herself against his flat-muscled body. Her fingers, not her own, ran down his back and traced the shape of his buttocks. Deep in his throat he groaned, and she could feel the great muscles clenching in her hands, she could feel him shuddering in her arms.
When she folded her legs and drew him in with her hand, it was light. When he began to move in her, it was light. Light washed the bedclothes and lifted them up. Lost in light, they passed through each other, and then they were light itself.
“You think anybody heard us?” he gasped, coming to his senses.
“You sound like a steam engine,” she laughed, slapping his chest. “Don’t worry, they’re all out.” She fit herself into his arms and they lay there a long time, not speaking, but she knew what he was thinking. “You’re shocked?”
“No, w
hy should I be?” he lied without conviction.
“Because I’m not the type you think. Well,” she went on, taking a deep breath to steady her voice, “I’m not. You’re only the second one. But I’m not sorry. Are you?”
She was making a point, he understood. She might be a socialist, but that didn’t make her into some crazy Free-Lover. “Are you kidding? Did I sound like I was sorry?”
What had made her do such a thing? She felt worse than sorry, but dizzy and exhilarated, too. Making love to him was like slipping a silk blouse into her coatsleeve, the sheer excitement of getting away with it, and the fear that she would do it again. Against her better judgment, against her will, against her principles. In a fever, principles melted so easily, didn’t they?
“Next time we’ll use a sheepskin,” she added, the efficient nurse coming to the surface.
“Who’s the first?”
She put her hand on his wilted penis and yanked it softly. “That’s my business. You want to tell me everyplace he’s been? H’mm?”
“I don’t think so,” he laughed. She was prickly, blunt. He liked her, but she made him nervous, too. Now that they were so intimate, what did she expect from him? And who was the first? One of her scruffy anarchist friends? He could have her again, she’d said it plain as day, but was she intending to keep two lovers? Or was it all a ruse to lure him in deeper? He didn’t believe in love, but he felt so comfortable talking to her. She had a good head on her shoulders, and a profession too. He didn’t believe in romance, but she fit herself into his arms so sweet and tasty that he ached for her again. If a craving didn’t die, what was its name?
It only cost seven dollars to get Assistant Warden Vandersee to drop the charges against Faye and release her into Max’s custody. Although he didn’t know Vandersee personally, they both held Sim Addem in high regard. In the course of explaining the painful operation Faye had endured, a medical procedure Max invented on the spot, and her unfortunate recourse to Mrs. Winslow’s Syrup, Max also mentioned his warm feelings for Clubber Williams, the Tenderloin pantata, and Max Hochstim, king of the Essex Street Courthouse.
The Midnight Band of Mercy Page 26