Hummel sipped his drink. “Spanish. Willy gets cases of it. Not bad, eh? Let’s see. How could we turn this around to your advantage?”
“Tastes fine. How about another?”
He held out his glass to his tormentor. Hummel poured and then returned to his perch, the click, click, click of his heels driving Max to distraction. He wanted to reach out and break the little feet off at their ankles.
“Now, I could take this subpoena and lock it away, perhaps forever. Of course that would cost the firm money, as the girl would have to be compensated out of our own pocket. But what would I want in return?”
“My firstborn child?”
“No need to get grim. There is a relatively painless way out: don’t stick your nose in the wrong places.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Stop asking questions of certain people, you know who I mean, and don’t even think of writing any stories about it. You cooperate, and the firm will protect you. Not to speak of releasing you from this unfortunate breach-of-promise action. What do you say?”
“So you represent. …”
“It doesn’t matter who we represent. For your purposes, just imagine that we represent everybody.”
“Do I get some time to think about it?”
“Not a single second.”
It was too late to wake Mrs. DeVogt, and he wouldn’t be able to face Gretta and Belle in the morning either. With several of Hummel’s cheap brandies under his belt, he began drifting west in a dream. Finally, veering south, he grabbed the Sixth Avenue line at Chambers Street and rode blindly uptown. In a second-story apartment he saw a scrawny woman in a chemise, her head resting on a kitchen table. In another cube of light, an insomniac waving a flyswatter seemed to stare right back at him. No one ever quite said it, but the lure of the Night Owl was the dream that just once, if you kept your eyes focused on the worn-out, gas-lit rooms flashing by, you would finally see the mythical couple lost in the act.
In fact, the denizens of second-story flats were indeed remarkably casual about exposing their lives to the bone-rattling trains that passed a few feet from their windows. They ate dinner in their underwear, they drank and argued and threw things at each other, they even embraced, but Max had never seen any lovemaking. Perhaps in these exposed cells, not much lovemaking was going on.
A man in overalls and a toolbox got on at Houston Street, along with a few bleary clerks and a worker with ink-spattered palms, stigmata of the printing trades. He’d never felt so low. All this time and he’d never realized it—Faye believed he was a bust and that he was coming apart at the seams to boot. When he thought about how he’d been stymied, his church expose in limbo, his love affairs misshapen, his finances in ruins, Hummel fixed on his neck, he wondered why he hadn’t gone to pieces before. Faye may have been changing the subject for her own benefit, but she knew him better than anybody else.
The Night Owl’s wheels squealed, the Forney rained sparks on the streets below, and all of his carefully tended blind spots drifted into the light. He had done a brilliant job concealing the obvious. He had no prospects, no future. One day he would wake up and find himself a gray-beard, glued to the same bench, writing the same stories for the same rate, a used-up ribbon printing fainter and fainter on the typewriter’s platen. He’d end up like the hoary clerks in the Classified section, or the humpbacked proofreaders who lived in single rooms with a gas ring.
At Bleecker Street a man in a glittering gown tripped into the car, swinging his hips and batting his kohl-smeared eyes. In the past Max would have reacted with revulsion, but now he was riding the Night Owl too, and he wondered at the nancy’s confidence, the way he sashayed down the aisle and blew kisses with his painted mouth. This brave soul didn’t give a damn if he was going up, down, or sideways. All he cared about was whether his beard was showing through his powder.
As the train rushed further uptown, the lights grew fewer. Soon it was plunging through uptown’s pure darkness. Max fitted the night around himself, surrendering to anonymity. He slept in short bursts as the Night Owl made circuit after circuit. Fitfully, he wondered if he could find a way around Hummel, but every scheme unraveled before his eyes. Why should he risk his skin, running down stories best left buried? Even Wall Street barons did flips when Abe Hummel whistled. Who was he to stand up to the brilliant extortionist?
Finally exiting where he had started, and after taking the hair of the dog at Logan’s, he headed across City Hall Park to Newspaper Row.
His eyes dry as sand, he threw his overtired bones down on his chair. Didn’t the scattered, beat-up typewriters tell the real tale? He was working in a word factory, but a factory nevertheless. He watched, numb, as Parnell picked his way through the packed desks and ascended to the throne.
Shoving himself to a standing position, Max walked on stiff legs across the newsroom. There was only one way to keep Abe Hummel from devouring him. Parnell raised his rheumy eyes. “You’re starting in already, Greengrass?”
It was time to embrace defeat. The good stoic, he took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “No, no, it’s not that, Stan. I was thinking it would be best for all concerned, considering the … conflict over the article … that I withdraw it. I don’t want you….”
“Too late, kiddo,” Parnell growled. “Morning edition, column three. Jump to page six. You’E have to follow up, too, before Pulitzer gets on the bandwagon.”
“There’s no way you can yank … ?”
“Did you hear me? Column three. Follow up. You got wax in your ears?”
He didn’t want this, not now. He was just beginning to relish despair. How had it happened? He couldn’t get his mind around it. “What about Garvey? I heard….”
“That cowboy from California picked him off. He’s bought half the Worlds staff too, from what I hear.”
“Garvey went over to the Journal?”
“That amateur Hearst, yeah. McGowen says he’s bleeding fifty thousand a month. These traitors are going to come running back with their tails between their legs.”
Max stood there, stupefied. He couldn’t hold back the tide. The hazards of good fortune would soon destroy him.
He spent the day in a daze, going over and over his predicament. The minute the Holy Trinity article hit the street, Hummel would set his court date. His name would appear in the papers; and when Bennett got wind that his reporter had been branded a deadbeat, the publisher would toss him out onto the sidewalk. It was one thing to carry an account with Sim Addem, but quite another to have a judge issue legal documents declaring a man a pauper and a liar. No publisher could trust a reporter who thumbed his nose at his financial obligations. A ruined man stayed ruined.
Howe and Hummel had snapped the spines of brokers, sportsmen, judges, industrialists, actors, producers, and, it was rumored, at least two senators. How could he defend himself against such polished predators? Despair was a form of freedom, though. He might be doomed, but if he could stitch together all of the fragments before his destruction… . The church. The Midnight Band. Insurance policies bought as a speculation. A hidden commodities market. The underground arteries that pumped blood between goo-goos and gangsters, preachers and ponces, a unifying theory that wiped away distinctions between saviors and their prey….
chapter thirty-seven
He needed Belle; he would have to forget her double-dealing. He tried to re-create the simple soul she had once seemed to him, but he couldn’t resurrect this vision of her. That she allowed two men to paw her at the same time revolted him. Did she lie down with both on the same day? Had she been making the same agonized noises in the back of her throat with some stinking refugee from the Pale? He saw the other man’s fingernails, moons of dirt, smelled his sweat and the stewed onions on his breath.
And yet when he saw her sitting across the dinner table on Sunday, so lovely and austere, he still wanted her. How could she be so stained and yet appear so pure? Her cameo of a face looked exactly the same. Her hood
ed eyes, her delicate nose, her bud of a mouth hadn’t changed. He could feel his hands closing around her tiny waist, stroking her flaring hips. He could still sense the shock of her kiss.
He had to pass the plate of snap beans to her. How could such a basic act be so difficult? So awkward? So freighted with clashing insinuations? Suddenly a hand intruded, he saw the flash of a checked cuff, and the plate was whisked away.
“Max, chop-chop. The lady’s got an appetite. Lookit, he’s in a dream world,” Danny said.
“Thank you, Mr. Swarms,” Belle replied, with mock politeness. “The newspaper business is driving him around the bend.”
“He prowls around at all hours,” Mrs. DeVogt observed.
Somewhere in the back of his brainpan a clever remark was sizzling. He just couldn’t quite seize it.
“Hey, snap out of it. Presto!” Aping a stage mesmerist, Danny wriggled his fingers.
“Where’s Gretta?” he blurted, looking around the table.
“That Van Rensselaer daughter is sitting for her portrait tonight. In buckskin, Gretta says,” Mrs. DeVogt informed the table.
“Ahh. Well, I’m preoccupied, I suppose.” He extended his leg, but Belle had withdrawn her ankles to a safe distance. He inclined his head slightly in the direction of the staircase, but she stared right through him.
After dinner, she swept up the stairs, but he trotted after her, catching up on the first landing. “Belle, wait. We’ve got to talk.”
She whirled to face him, her jaw set. “Talk….” Mrs. DeVogt certainly knew what was what, but Belle didn’t want to believe Max would two-time her, especially under the same roof. Not after that night. But what did she expect from his type? At least Jake was faithful. Too faithful. With one side of his mouth he said he didn’t believe in private property and with the other he wanted to own her. Now nobody owned her.
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Would you come by my room?”
“Everybody goes to your room. It’s a regular Madison Square Garden, I hear.” She hated the caustic sound of her own voice, but he deserved it. A dog in a suit, that’s all he was. She’d invented his kindness and melancholy out of her own romantic delusions. Love. Ha. A greasy sheepskin and endless regrets.
“What are you talking about?”
“I didn’t believe it until you started mooning over her right at the table. You should show a little more taste.”
He grabbed her wrist. “We need some privacy.”
She wrenched her arm away. “The whole house knows your ‘privacy.'”
He backed away, shaken by her fury. “Please. I need a favor. For Faye and the kid, too.”
Her arms crossed over her chest, she glared at him. “You first,” she said finally, shooing him towards his door.
She wouldn’t sit down. Instead, she staked out a place near the window, as far away from him as possible. “So, talk,” she said brusquely.
“I thought … I thought we were friends,” he said, groping for neutral language.
“Was she or wasn’t she?” How could he fall for those insipid looks, those fake Parisian fashions—knocked off in some loft on Henry Street, no doubt—not to speak of the woman’s empty head. She wouldn’t know de Maupassant from de Cock. It galled her.
“What?”
“That spoiled cow.”
The way she was coming at him from on high was getting under his skin. Here she was posing like the Virgin Queen herself. Where the hell did she get off pulling this routine? “Look, for the record, nothing … untoward … happened between me and Gretta. And from what I hear, you have a few things to answer for yourself.”
The accusation burst out, ugly and unadorned. Enraged, he had no desire to take it back.
Every drop of color drained from her face. “And who’s telling tales?”
“Never mind. I know you’re … keeping house … with somebody else. So our hands aren’t so clean. Neither of us.”
She was so mortified, she thought she would faint. She was living inside that dream she had over and over. The hooligan wolf-whistling. Union Square. Her sheer chemise fluttering around her knees. Shame that swallowed her whole. Somehow she remained on her feet, somehow she croaked a retort. “Sorry your sister can’t keep a confidence. It doesn’t mean I don’t have certain feelings.”
She looked so brave and wan that he wanted to take her into his arms right then, but his wounded pride still held the upper hand. “I was hoping we could be friendly.”
“So, it’s true, you’re going with her? I’m sorry I don’t have a mansion on Staten Island.” He was running after the Sealy woman’s money. Why should she be surprised? Ambition without substance. Why else would he work for that sensational rag of his? Oh, she was sick to her stomach.
“That’s not fair. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
A new spasm of shame gripped her. She had been hard on Jake, who at least had some ideals. She’d crumpled him up and tossed him aside, and now she was left with this one, who believed in nothing. “Send me a telegram.”
“I was hoping we could work on something together. I’ll probably get fired in the next few days….”
“Why should they fire you? You’re such a loyalist.”
In her mouth the word sounded like royalist. She refused to bend, but still she lingered. A thick silence descended.
He cleared his throat. “Did you see today’s paper?”
“No, I had so many calls. Who has time?”
He pulled a much-folded copy of the Herald from his inside pocket. “Just do me one favor. Read this. If you don’t want to help me then, fine.”
He cajoled her to sit in his Morris chair. Tight-lipped, she sat and spread the blanket-sized pages out on her lap. In the end, the headline man had gone for the throat.
HOLYTRINITY CORPORATION
RULES EMPIRE OF DECAY
Rookeries Bursting at the Seams
Buildings As Dangerous As Old Hospitals
He had arrayed his facts with inexorable logic. His reporting had a diamond-hard quality he’d never achieved before, but he was far from satisfied. If the church was connected to the Midnight Band’s insurance game that story might, if he handled it right, transcend any tale of broken pump handles and the white lung’s rampages. Riis had set off his flash powder in a world of darkness, but the shadow world had eluded his lens. Who could take pictures of a shrouded trade that turned the city’s most worthless commodities into gold?
She read in great gulps, her intelligent eyes devouring the columns. He watched as her expression mutated from suspicion to absorption to disgust. When she was finished, she shook her head. “Crooks with their white collars; then they try to justify it, no less. This Colonel Fisk character. Have you ever noticed how when they steal, they turn it into some high and mighty principle? You wrote this?”
“I did. And take a look at this.”
He dropped Miss Van Siclen’s ledger into her hands and watched as she turned the pages, a quizzical look on her face. “These are the addresses? They own half the downtown?”
“Nah, only a fraction. A bigger fraction than anybody else, though. I want to ask you something. Yesterday I was over at that lady who takes care of Leon. Mrs. Darling. She had kids stacked up in there like chickens in a coop. Do you know anything about it?”
“Oh, she’s probably running a baby farm,” Belle said without hesitation. Alarmed, she added “Faye can’t keep him there!”
“What’s a baby farm?”
“These women, they’re barely surviving themselves, they take on too many children. Before you know it, the mothers can’t pay and the minders, they’re giving the kids bottles full of water, or worse. Paregoric to keep the infant quiet. They can’t afford milk.”
“And if the mother disappears, what re the odds the kid will survive?”
She didn’t flinch. A clinical note entered her voice. “Maybe if one of the charities takes the infant. That’s maybe. Most, you’re asking me? They starve to de
ath. It takes ten days, two weeks at most. Skin and bones, that’s what’s left. I saw one of these businesses on Allen Street. Four died in one day, and who knows, that may be normal. I saw another one on Mott Street and another one on Elizabeth. They’re all over town. Once in a blue moon the Health Department might come around. What do you think the inspector wants?” and she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together in the time-honored gesture.
“You make it sound like everyday business.”
She gave him a look. “Are we living in the same city?”
Her casual response made the underground trade all the more unspeakable. Was there such a thing as mundane horror? How many of these farms operated on Holy Trinity property? Did they produce on a regular schedule? Why not? The tenements poured out velvet flowers, fresh macaroni, gabardine pants, feathers, beaded cords, and boxed nuts. Why not another product? You could slap a healthy mark-up on this one, and there was an endless supply.
He directed her back to the ledger. “Look at the back pages. See those numbers?”
“M’mm…. What are they supposed to mean?”
He sat on the edge of the mattress and coughed into his fist. His chest tightening, he wondered if she’d think he was half-cracked. “Insurance policies. They buy back insurance policies the mothers have bought on their kids. They’re banking on them croaking. Or … or probably they’re helping the sickest kids along. You think that sounds nuts, huh?”
He’d need to nail down every last detail. How were the policies transferred? Who signed the death certificates?
In a delayed reaction, her delicate features screwed up in distaste. “God, that’s awful. Is that what they’re doing? Who are theyT
“I think it’s the Midnight Band of Mercy.”
Now she did give him a fishy look. “Do you know what you’re saying? It’s monstrous. They do it for money?”
“Not for the money, not entirely. For the cause. The money’s secondary.”
By the time the Midnight Band came along, the damage had already been done. The mother had lost her husband, her lover, her job. She couldn’t pay the baby farmer, whose own children were clinging to the precipice. The insurance policy represented hope and self-deception and sleight of hand. No one was more concerned than Mrs. Edwards. She would take care of things … if the worst came to pass. And when the time came for the final act of mercy, it was performed in a mist of perfumed lies.
The Midnight Band of Mercy Page 36