The Midnight Band of Mercy

by Michael Blaine

  The next morning, steeling himself for the guillotine, he had pushed open the frosted-glass doors. Copy boys were racing around like mad monkeys. Typewriters ping’ed at the end of each line. Swanson dipped his pen into an inkpot. Corelli fixed his pince-nez on his nose and held his handwritten copy at arm’s length. Nick Biddle peeked over the back of a young secretary, generously pointing out her mistakes. Two phones rang. The familiar undertone of muttering, sighs, and complaints merged into a single humming noise, the hiss and rattle of the sentence mill.

  Parnell had studiously ignored him.

  Max had intended to assault the throne and press his case right away, but he had all the time in the world to get fired. Instead, he wandered over to his scarred desk and made a small pyramid of notebooks, ink bottles, pencils, and pens. Then he gathered his clippings from the bottom drawer. Gazing at this homely pile of possessions, he saw the finality of his predicament. Craning his neck, he stared up at the ceiling. A black, furry dust clung to the stamped tin. If he was fired now, he would never get a desk at the paper’s elegant new digs on Herald Square. It would take him years to climb back to the same roost at some other paper, if one would have him at all.

  He barely heard Parnell call his name, but he was fully prepared for a curt send-off.

  “Go down to payroll and sign your papers, Greengrass,” the editor told him. “Maybe then you’ll get off my back for a while.”

  Minsky, the paymaster, made it official. The Herald had hired him as a general assignment reporter.

  He felt a muted elation, but that soon faded. The grind was exactly the same. A kitchen fire and a horsecar fracas. A wolfhound who howled “On the Banks of the Wabash” to piano and strings. A suicide at the Metropolitan Hotel. A double wedding for Siamese twins. His first check seemed a bit skinny, but he took Biddle out for a cocktail anyway.

  “You racked up so many sticks,” Nick observed, with his unerring instincts, “they had to take you on to save money. Why do you think Harding Davis won’t go on the payroll?”

  “Because he piles up so many inches?”

  Back at his desk Max did the calculations and found that the paper would save, on average, $3.45 a week by putting him on salary. He’d have to put the touch on Belle for that new suit.

  The Henry Street Settlement House was unanimous in its praise, yet how could he explain to Mr. Schiff that Superintendent Byrnes had resisted the very investigation he was now taking credit for? Or to Miss Wald that a man could be murdered and evaporate the same day? Or that he had settled for a limping approximation of the truth? Or that the Heralds headline editor might tell this version of the story:

  MIDNIGHT BAND OF MERCY IN

  EUTHANASIA-FOR-PROFIT SCHEME

  Superintendent Byrnes Cracks Ring

  Mrs. Edwards and Cohorts Confess to

  Insurance Murders

  Fiendish Negress a Partner in Crime

  Then there were the crosscurrents. Even as he fought Parnell tooth and nail, he saw the wisdom of his editor’s remarks. Mrs. Edwards had confessed but declined to implicate either the church or the Immigration Restriction League. MacNamara had offered up a few bare facts, along with a handful of his teeth. Though Max knew in his bones that Marianne Granger was telling the truth, his sources were thin. He’d had to settle for half a loaf, but look at how much of the shadow world he’d dragged into the light.

  “I’d be happy to talk to the committee. Let me speak to my editors.”

  “You’ll ask them if you can share your notes?” Schiff persisted.

  “I’ll raise the issue.” There was no way in holy hell he’d let them see his raw scribblings. “But don’t worry. I’ll give you more than you can handle.”

  “That’s marvelous, isn’t it, Mr. Schiff?” Miss Wald said.

  His face was burning, and he didn’t dare look at Belle.

  Years before, when he’d started out scrambling for squibs, he’d had no intention of illuminating anything at all. Now he was being lionized as the Second Coming of Jacob Riis. Little did his admirers know that he had a permanent case of newspaperman’s disease. Yet he wondered if now he hadn’t been infected with the worst impulse of all: to render justice. Belle said that to be a whole human being, you had to take a position, and he saw her point. But sides had sides, and he wasn’t quite sure where to stand. He was in sympathy with her certainty, but he couldn’t quite shed his undermining cynicism.

  On the subject of Miss Rose, he had no ambivalence whatsoever. He loved her, and he was even willing to flirt with goo-goos—though he drew the line at temperance fanatics—to keep her close.

  chapter forty-two

  Loving Belle wasn’t a simple thing. She was a prickly pear, an interrogator with a ferocious curiosity. Sitting with him on Mrs. DeVogt’s steps, she wouldn’t let the case go.

  “He made a big speech, your Mr. Weems,” she began.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “You don’t know what these people believe?”

  “Sure. They want to slam the door shut and keep out all that riff-raff from Europe. Lucky for us, you got in.”

  “And it’s my ambition to be the death of them,” she laughed. “You watch. Soon they’ll pass laws to keep us out.”

  He was more interested in curling her hair around his index finger than talking politics. Anyway, he figured she was blowing things out of proportion again. “That’s daffy. No one’s gonna follow a line of crap like that.”

  “They fill a hall plenty of times.”

  Personally, he wasn’t worried about the lunatic fringe, but he figured he’d humor her. “Yeah, that they do.”

  From the step above her, he leaned down and kissed the nape of her neck. He spread his legs, and she let her head fall back on his knee. In the lamplight, the street was wet and gleaming. “I like the way it looks after the rain,” she replied.

  A maroon phaeton rolled by, the soothing sound of its chestnut’s hooves echoing down the street. Craning her neck, her back arched, she drew him down and kissed him full on the mouth. Her darting tongue explored, questioned, penetrated. Her fingers were in his hair. That night, she slipped into his bed in her sheer chemise, shook her thick black hair loose, and ran her hands under his nightshirt. Covering his mouth, she straddled him, and he almost fainted.

  She brought a sheepskin with her, of course. She was a visiting nurse, and she’d seen everything. Every night she came to him now, and Mrs. DeVogt, true to her creed, never said a word.

  It was a dream to make love to her, and to have an ally too. He was forgetting how it felt to be alone, to live completely inside his head with the whole world arrayed against him. If he had to show up at the Henry Street Settlement House once in a blue moon, it was a small price to pay.

  When her mother fell ill again, Gretta said she didn’t know how long she would be away. She looked magnificent, but more distant than ever. In fact, Max had the strongest premonition that she would live her life out alone, but perfectly content, hauling her fifty pounds of cameras around town, retreating to her cottage by the harbor, then setting out again like the tide.

  On her way to Staten Island, she asked him to walk her to the train. His affair with Belle was out in the open by then. Consequently, Gretta had become a trace more formal. He responded in kind, but her throaty voice still thrilled him.

  “Am I right, then, that Martin’s been forgotten, that there will be no case? You’re on to something new?” she asked.

  “It’s all played out. I’m sorry. At least you know what happened.”

  When they reached the El, she offered her gloved hand. “Yes. It was kind of you to explain it all … and to risk so much for me.”

  “Forget it. I had plenty invested myself.”

  “If you ever need a picture, a wedding picture, I’ll be happy to be the one. As a favor.”

  “Ahh, that’s generous. I’ll mention it to Belle.”

  Belle’s Russian eyes turned to slits when he repeated the offer. “Tell that cow to kee
p her camera to herself,” she snapped.

  When they went down to City Hall, Faye’s friend, the publicity photographer Ira Gold, made two plates for them. In Max and Belle’s wedding picture, taken in the municipal chapel before a few dozen Syrians, Sicilians, Bohemians, Polish Jews, and Greeks, and a smattering of Norwegians and Swedes, the rectangular sign saying “Marriage License: $1” appears to be growing out of the groom’s head.

  Belle wore a fitted wide-lapeled jacket with enormous sleeves and a jaunty boater. Max appeared in a morning coat, checked bow tie, and white vest. In glistening taffeta, Faye struck a dancer’s pose. She knew exactly how to trick the lens and make her double chin disappear. For Faye, the full profile amounted to professional suicide.

  The ceremony seemed to lift Faye’s spirits. Ever since Danny had absconded with the widow Sutherland, the New Haven heiress whose deceased husband had invented the Deliverance Coffin, she’d been deep in the dumps. As far as Max was concerned, Danny had revealed his true colors, and he’d better not show his song-plugging face again in New York if he knew what was good for him.

  Faye seemed more indignant at the inventor Sutherland, whose device offered an escape mechanism for the buried-alive, than at Danny. “You know how that thing works? They put some kinda ball on the body’s chest, and if the corpse wriggles or something, this thing explodes and sends up a signal. That’s how she made her pile!”

  “We’re trying to get married, Faye,” Belle pointed out.

  “Keith wants me to call myself Fritzie now. Fritzie Credenza. What’s wrong with Faye Greengrass?”

  Belle insisted that she wouldn’t mind living with Faye and Leon for a while, until his sister got back on her feet, but lately she had begun to raise questions: Had he ever noticed how money ran like water through Faye’s hands? Was there an end to her blues? Didn’t she know Ira Gold was using her to get business from her actress friends? Didn’t she understand that her new manager, Cookie Grimes, was a reptile? When exactly did she plan to stand on her own two feet again?

  Faye had to make a five o’clock curtain, so Max and Belle went over to her room off Union Square and kept an eye on Leon until the nanny showed up. They caught Faye’s last turn and then they all went out to celebrate at a new lobster palace on Broadway and 41st.

  “Now we’ve got to keep him out of the saloons,” Faye declared as they clinked champagne glasses.

  “Are you kidding?” Max retorted. “I’ve gotta keep you buzzers outta the Tombs.”

  When the lobster arrived, Max had to show Belle how to crack the claws. It didn’t take her long to learn.

  One of Nicholas Biddle’s lungs filled with fluid, then the other. Max visited him in his flat, along with a string of other reporters who tried to comfort him by drinking and smoking by his side late into the night. Biddle’s withered landlady supplied moist cloths for his brow and pitchers of ice water for his unquenchable thirst. Nick muttered a blue streak about a pile of black snow and asked an invisible woman named Carla to come, dear God, come to his bed, only to break into lucid moments more painful to observe than his delirium. In one of these conscious fits, he grasped Max’s hand and swore he was leaving him everything.

  Max looked around the flat at the faded hangings, the Japanese prints, the worn-smooth Oriental rug, the sprung divan, the storm of clothes hanging from hooks and lamps, and found the one thing he wanted, a Roman head with a shattered nose. Its hair, carved in intricate curls, was dark with grit, its eyes skinned with dust. That night he put the cast under his arm and hauled it home.

  Near the corner of Thirteenth and Sixth, he sensed his face was wet. Only then did he realize he’d been crying the whole time. Shifting the broken-nosed Roman to his left arm, he groped for a handkerchief. Biddle’s life frightened him; he didn’t want to die alone.

  In a matter of days, Nicholas Biddle faded from existence. Scattered across his desk he had left notes in his savage scrawl, a half-finished story, nubs of grease erasers, and a congealed inkpot. The sight disturbed Max as much as his friend’s death rattle. An impromptu wake sprang up at Logan’s and, with pickled eggs and day-old sardellen as ballast, the reporters drank round after round to the deceased. Biddle, who had spent every cent that ever passed through his hands, left behind his Oriental furnishings, his opium layout, three suits, three shirts, and two pairs of shoes.

  “Don’t forget the bad debts, boys,” Stan Parnell added. Booze went right to the frail editor’s head. Reeling, he went on, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but he did it in style … left less … than nothing….”

  This observation brought a cheer from the assembly, though it had a sobering effect on Max, who was scouting for an apartment. Belle had worked out the numbers. With the right deal, they could save half their paychecks. If Faye kept up her end of the bargain.

  He caught Parnell just as the editor was losing his grip on the bar. His leader smiled his lipless smile. In a wet whisper, he said, “Willy’s all yours now.”

  With thumb and forefinger, like something unclean, William H. Howe held up Max’s subpoena. The weather had turned bitter in late October, so the ruddy-faced lawyer kept a healthy fire going in his office.

  “Glad we could help you with this,” Howe growled, dropping the summons into the fiery grate. “We’re going to miss Biddle,” he sighed. Lost in thought, he fingered a lapel on his bottle-green jacket.

  “We had another mutual friend who passed away recently,” Max replied. “Now that matters are settled … just out of curiosity, did the father bury an empty box?”

  “We had no reason to add to the man’s grief,” Howe replied. “Suppose we prevailed on him not to view the remains, which is not to say there were any, we would have had the best of motives. You wouldn’t torment the poor man again, would you?”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” the reporter agreed. Howe’s gnomic pronouncement would have to do.

  Intently, Max watched the summons turn to ash. He’d packed on some weight since he’d gotten married, a protective layer of flesh that comforted him in the vast lawyer’s presence. “They say Nick was there before the flood.”

  “Ha! He probably crawled out of the Old Collect Pond. We worked together on a hundred cases if we worked on one.”

  Max’s ears pricked up. He thought he knew what was coming, but he had to hear the words from Howe’s lips. “He did a profile of you once?”

  He was ready to draw Howe’s portrait himself now. What about his murky London days? His years as a physician? Or was it horse doctor? The murders he’d witnessed as a boy. Or known too much about. He felt a curious sympathy for the man. Perhaps because he knew too much himself.

  “A fine piece of work it was. Now what are we to do? I have the prettiest murder case. My client is absolutely upstanding. A masseur on St.

  Mark’s Place. The D.A. is trying to railroad him over some barber they found in pieces.”

  Howe rummaged around in his desk drawer and drew out a greenback. Max couldn’t make out the denomination.

  “Really?”

  Chubby fingers pushed the bill across the polished mahogany.

  “Absolutely outrageous. They don’t even have the whole body. No head. All of his alleged tattoos skinned off. Then there’s the barber’s wife, a woman with a spotty reputation.”

  Now Max could see the figure. A crisp hundred. A very decent price for good publicity.

  Max knew something William H. Howe did not, however. A witness from an old and insignificant divorce proceeding had developed a personal grudge against Howe and Hummel, and had passed on certain highly damaging information. In fact, based on Mr. Schiff’s recommendation, the D.A. had confided in Max and was trying to recruit him to the cause.

  “Once a month, say? Nick worked his way up to that, but you’ve got responsibilities now, don’t you? And what they’re asking for a decent flat these days, highway robbery!”

  How did the lawyer know Belle was pregnant? Had he posted spies under Max’s bed? They had alr
eady talked about moving out to Brooklyn where the rents were a bit saner, but who wanted to live in the wilds of Flatbush? One hundred a month would do very nicely. They might be able to buy into some rooms on the Upper West Side.

  The beautiful bill sat there between them. Nostalgia for the old times sang to him, but the endgame was near. “Sorry, Willy. Can’t do business that way any more.”

  “Why in the world not?” Howe asked, his voice tinged with sadness.

  What could he say? That a few murders stood between them? Willy would profess ignorance, and who knew if he hadn’t kept himself safely in the dark. It was an odd sensation to sit there across from Howe and know exactly how the great lawyer would fall. There would be no three-hour appeals to the jury from his knees this time. The case against the firm was clean and technical. Delay until death was his only hope.

  “I don’t know. But things are changing. Take the National League. They’re talking about bringing in an infield fly rule. The infielder won’t be allowed to drop the ball on purpose any more.” Under his hoary eyebrows, William H. Howe’s eyes widened in horror. “Well, at least take a decent cigar. Fresh from New Haven. You’re not some sort of Methodist now, are you?”

  A barber, a cuckolded masseuse, and a decapitated torso. It did sound promising. He could cast it as William H. Howe’s last ride. “Tell me about the barber, Willy,” he said, reaching for the golden Connecticut leaf.

  acknowledgments

  I could not have written The Midnight Band of Mercy without the unstinting love, support—and criticism—of my wife, Rose Mackiewicz. Her wicked sense of humor sustained me through the dark days of composition.

  Anna Tasha Blaine, my daughter, did much to bring this work to fruition. Her excitement for the material was contagious

  My agent, Sally Wofford-Girand, provided wise counsel when it came time to cut those passages I loved only too much.

  Laura Hruska, my editor at Soho Press, edited with precision, but without doing violence to language and structure.