Jimmy and Fay

by Michael Mayo

  We went through the door into a big square room with gaslights on the wall, a wooden floor worn smooth, and a heavy haze of tobacco smoke. Looked like most of the men there were leaving their hats and cloaks with a hatcheck girl off to one side of the door and then heading straight for a bar at the back. The fat guy who was right in front of me doffed his cloak and revealed a bright blue military coat with gold epaulets, braid and fringe, and a red sash. When he turned toward the bar, he put on a mask and a peaked cap with more gold braid. He had a chest full of medals and ribbons. The hatcheck girl, who wasn’t Connie, had two stacks of masks on her table. I’d seen them in Bobby’s workroom.

  Figuring there was a chance we’d be making a fast exit, Arch and I had left our overcoats in the car. We moved out of the way of the guys heading for the drinks. I still couldn’t get a good look at the room, but I saw that there were at least three tables with eats, all surrounded by men. It was a hungry, thirsty, happy crowd. Lots of laughing, some of it nervous and uncomfortable, some way too loud. Guys doing something dirty. Breaking the rules. Together. They were ready to see something new. Hell, that part of it got to me, too.

  I said to Arch, “You work that side. I’ll take this one. If we find her, we’ll meet up, figure out what to do next.”

  He nodded and left. I made my way around the other way and that’s when the pure foolishness of what we were doing hit me. I thought, She’s a grown woman. She can do whatever the hell she wants. Where do you get off trying to ‘rescue’ her from anything? And then the jealous crazy part said, Screw that. She shouldn’t be here. This is dangerous for a girl like her and you’ve got to take care of her. But it was too late for that, anyway. I was there. I’d see it through.

  First off, I headed for the closest food to see if anybody was serving. Nobody was, and the trays of meat, cheese, and bread had been picked clean. I moved on and checked the room more closely. Most of the men wore tuxedos and masks. I couldn’t tell if they knew each other or not. I saw four guys with women, working girls by the amount of pale white flesh they were showing off. Two guys drinking beer were wearing old Roman or Greek outfits, one in a toga with a bunch of branches and leaves on his head, and the other in a skirt and sandals and armor and a metal helmet with a big crest on top. Another man was wearing a blue mask and a full dress police uniform. And there was a guy in a black suit like mine, not a tuxedo, with gray hair and heavy jowls. I was pretty sure it was the Olds chauffeur because when he saw me looking at him, he stared right back, like he knew who I was. I tried to get closer, but he ducked into the crowd.

  The band was six colored guys with piano, drums, and a lot of brass. They were playing hard and loud on a stage in one corner near the front door, really growling out jungle jazz. They wore some kind of leopard-skin outfits. I guess Bobby wanted them to add to his atmosphere. The women moved close to the stage. When they couldn’t get their guys out onto the floor, they danced with each other.

  Not far away from the bandstand, there was a big square moving picture screen on another dais, with about sixty or seventy chairs arranged in rows in front of it. On the opposite wall was the projection booth, a big box made out of plywood and painted flat black. It had the same handmade look as the shelves in Bobby’s workroom and studio.

  I’d got about a third of the way around the room when I saw the first waitress. She was a young blonde with heavy makeup and a smile that didn’t look quite right. I figured her to be new to this. She was collecting empty glasses and taking orders for booze and beer. She kept shifting her tray from hand to hand and reaching up to fiddle with her brassiere under a tightly buttoned pink blouse. She moved away before I could get to her, so I headed for the bar.

  Being short, as I was and am, it’s easy to move through a crowd of big guys, but I couldn’t see over them to get a good look at the whole room. It got harder to maneuver as I edged closer to the booze.

  I shouldered up to the table and saw that a man and a woman were handling the hooch. She was a tall, harried brunette. Not Connie. I could tell by the big bottles without labels that it was the cheap swamp water they peddled at second-rate speaks. When I got the brunette’s attention, I asked for a glass of seltzer and left a quarter in the tip glass. She was surprised. It was the first of the night.

  As I pushed back through the crowd, I saw that there was a staircase to the second floor in a corner. It was roped off and dark.

  Moving back to the middle of the room, I guessed the crowd at less than a hundred with guys still coming in. Most of them were puffing Havanas and knocking back the booze. I saw a flash of pink at the edge of my vision, but it was gone before I got a good look so I went that way. Trying not to look like I was hurrying, I moved around toward where I thought Arch might be. A lot of guys got in my way, and I was almost back to the hatcheck girl when I saw the back of a woman in a pink blouse taking a tray of glasses through a door near the end of the bar. She was short and had dark hair. I was about to pull the door open, but the guy working the bar said, “Staff only.”

  Before I could do anything, the blond waitress hurried out with a tray of drinks. The bartender gave me a hard look. I tried to give him a hard look back, but I was wearing a cat mask. He was not scared.

  I went back out into the room and kept moving until I came upon another waitress, another blonde but not the first. This one knew the score. The band was cutting loose so I had to lean close to talk to her.

  “Is there a girl named Connie working tonight?”

  She looked confused for a second, then shook her head and said, “I don’t know any of the girls’ names.”

  “She’s short, black hair, dark complexion. Real cute.”

  “We’ve got two of ’em like that,” she said, then put her lips right next to my ear, “but I’m cuter. And I can prove it.”

  She stepped back and gave me a commercial smile.

  “Not tonight, sweetheart,” I said.

  She smiled, shrugged, and blew me a kiss as she left.

  Arch showed up. He hadn’t seen Connie either. I asked him if he’d seen two short, dark-haired waitresses. He said no. I told him what the waitress said, so we worked the room again, taking the other sides. By then, it was even smokier than it was when we got there, and hotter, too. The mask was starting to chafe. Some of the men let their masks hang around their necks and some pushed them up on top of their heads. I saw more than a few faces I recognized from the papers. I also saw a second set of stairs in another corner. Like the first one, it was roped off.

  As I went through the crowd, I saw one waitress who was short, dark, and cute, and not Connie, but there was a lot I was missing. I’d been around the room twice before I made my way through a crowd of men who weren’t moving or talking. That’s where I saw a magic lantern, or something, that was projecting a series of still photographs on a small screen. It looked like some of them were shots I’d seen in Bobby’s picture books. These showed everything, including the big finishes. And, just like Bobby claimed, they looked great. The women were carefully posed and he managed to capture skin texture with angled light and shadow. I don’t remember anything about the guys in the pictures, but the men who were watching them stood still and paid close attention.

  By then I was getting restless and jumpy, and I knew that was no good. When I get restless and jumpy, I don’t think and I do stupid things. Right or wrong, I decided to see what was on the second floor.

  Nobody was paying attention as I eased around behind the crowd at the magic lantern and ducked under the rope at the foot of the stairs. I was careful and quiet and stopped at the landing to let my eyes adjust. When they did, I could make out a little light coming from a doorway above, and I heard voices arguing. I was more careful and quiet going the rest of the way up.

  When I reached the second floor, I saw the giant black hand that had been in Bobby’s Chinatown studio. He’d moved it to the middle of the room and surrounded it with chairs. There was a weak spotlight above. It gleamed down on Bobby’
s bald head.

  He was saying, “We’ll start with the light low, like this. Then we’ll get the key light there and the kick light over there.”

  He must have hit a switch. Another light came on with a snap and brightened the hand with a warm pink glow, and I could see who Bobby was talking to. It was Nola Revere and her costar. She was wearing another copy of the gauzy fairy-tale dress that Miss Wray wore in the real movie, the one that fell off her shoulders. There was a picture of her in it in Bobby’s book, and I’d seen another one with a red stain in his studio. Guess he had a lot of them. Couldn’t have cost too much, judging by the amount and thinness of the material. It showed her off and she had a lot to show off. Her costar was wearing a gorilla suit, but without the head. Even in that light, you could see that he was a really black colored guy. I mean so black he was almost blue, and he was tall, six and a half feet maybe, the suit made it hard to tell. He was also wearing a big codpiece, a furry black lump about the size of half a football.

  Bobby gestured toward the hand, making it pretty clear that they were going to use it as a bed. He said, “It’s gonna be just like before, right. You start out however you like, but you end it with her on her knees and you behind. Then you switch again and she’s on top. Got that? We can’t let those tits go to waste. That’s what they’re paying to see.”

  The colored guy shook his head and said something in Spanish. Bobby answered, “No, not now. After. That’s the deal, remember?”

  I couldn’t hear from where I was standing, so I strolled over and joined the group. When Bobby first saw me, he tried to be charming. “Excuse me, sir, it’ll be just a few minutes before we’re ready for this part of the performance. The film will be shown downstairs.” He wore a red ringmaster’s coat, jodhpurs, and black leather boots. His face was weirdly white under makeup and his lips were as red as his coat. Even with the cat mask, I was the most normal-looking guy in the room.

  I took off my mask, and said, “Hiya, Bobby.”

  “Goddammit, you little shit—”

  “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. I’m just here to see your movie and to meet the star.” I turned to her. “Miss Revere, right? Nola?”

  She looked up at the colored guy and grabbed his hand with both of hers.

  “No,” she said, standing straighter. “I’m Mrs. Carlos Sotolongo.”

  He held onto her hand and glared at me with a challenging frown. I guess Nola didn’t think that working with him was a fate worse than death like her pal Daphne.

  Bobby rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Be that as it may, I want to be sure you know your marks. Carlos, you carry her in from there.” He pointed to a curtained area. “Nola, you’re screaming and pounding his chest, just like when we did it for the film.”

  Carlos cut him off and rattled out some machine-gun Spanish.

  When he finished, his expression was still hard, and Bobby said, pleading, “But we already agreed to this. You get the money after the performance. Look, I told you, this can be the beginning of a groundbreaking career. For both of you. The money we’re haggling over tonight is nothing compared to your potential. Nothing! If you work with me, let me help you . . . Did you see that crowd down there? Some of the richest and most powerful men in the city are going to be watching you tonight. They’ll want to see more, you know that. What happened before, that was just a temporary problem. It’s solved. Didn’t you get your money? Of course you did. So you know I’m good for it. As soon as we’re finished, you’ll get everything I said you would.”

  Carlos’s expression didn’t change, and he shook his head. He turned his back to Nola, and she started undoing some laces on his back until Bobby stopped her.

  “No, goddammit, don’t do that. It takes him a fucking hour to put that thing on. Do you have any idea how much I had to pay for it? Not to mention the alterations. All right, all right, here.” He produced a thick roll of bills from his pocket. “Here’s half.”

  Carlos said something more in Spanish, and she started unlacing again.

  Bobby said, “Jeez, you fucking Cubans are worse than the fucking Jews,” and peeled off more bills.

  Carlos watched and counted along with him. Then he said something else in Spanish and Bobby answered, “No, you don’t need to worry about the cops, that’s taken care of, believe me it’s taken care of.”

  By then, they’d forgot about me, I think. Looking back on what Daphne said about Bobby trying to hold out on her, it figured that after he was finished making the picture, Bobby had stiffed Nola and Carlos. But then he decided that he needed them for his soirée cinémateque intime and had to pony up. He’d stacked up an impressive number of bills when the bartender came up the stairs.

  “Boss,” he said, “they’re here.”

  Bobby bolted past him like he’d been goosed in the ass, and the bartender was right behind him. I stayed there.

  Nola and Carlos were counting the cash. They looked at me like I was going to try to take it.

  “I’m Jimmy Quinn. You don’t know me, but we’ve got a couple of mutual acquaintances: Polly Adler and Daphne.” Given the circumstances, I figured Carlos knew about Nola’s work and she wouldn’t mind me mentioning it.

  She still looked suspicions. “What do you want?” Daphne said Nola’s English wasn’t that good, but Nola didn’t have much of an accent that I could hear.

  “Nothing. Daphne said if I saw you, you should give her a call. She’s worried about you.”

  She looked at Carlos and they talked in Spanish for a while, so low that I couldn’t hear them even if I knew the language. Then she said, “Is Daphne all right? Does she know that I did this?” and plucked at the dress.

  I was having a hell of a time not staring at her tits and crotch, and Carlos was making it clear that he wasn’t happy with my giving his new bride the eye. I guess they were doing what they had to do for money, but he didn’t like it a damn bit, you could tell that.

  “Yeah, she knows. She’s got a place down on Gay Street.”

  Nola shook her head. “Daphne doesn’t understand. I can’t explain it, and we don’t have time. Our ship leaves for Cuba tonight. Carlos has arranged everything, and we’re not going to change it.”

  Right then, for some reason, I thought about the beginning of King Kong and Carl Denham telling Miss Wray she had to come with him for this “opportunity of a lifetime” and everything that happened after that. Hell, maybe it was the dress or maybe I’m just a sap.

  I gave them a little salute with my stick and said, “Good luck to you then, and let me give you a word of advice. If you hear things getting loud and crazy down there, don’t hang around. Scram out of here as fast as you can.”

  She looked worried. Carlos’s glare didn’t change.

  Downstairs in the smoky room, the band stopped and the men went quiet as Bobby ushered two guys in from the back door. One of them had to be Peter Wilcox. The other was a wobbly codger with weak legs who got around on two canes. Both of them were wearing black domino masks and expensive bespoke tuxedos. Wilcox’s fit him perfectly. The old man had shriveled since his was measured. The collar was two sizes too big, and the padded shoulders of the jacket made him look like a dwarf.

  Arch Malloy sidled beside me and whispered, “That’s them, Peter Wilcox and the old pirate Learned, his dear old pater.”

  Bobby snapped his fingers, and two of the waitresses—neither Connie—scurried out to help the old guy. Each of them took an arm and got in close enough to press their breasts into his shoulders. Even with the mask, you could see his liver-lipped smile. They led him to a padded chair in the front row. He fell into it and reached a hand up under one girl’s skirt as she turned around. She froze but didn’t move away until he let her go. The bartender brought two tumblers of scotch.

  Bobby jumped up on the dais, raised his hands, and said in a loud voice, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, your attention, please. The first part of this evening’s entertainment will begin in just a few minutes. I believe w
e have time for everyone to refresh his drink and find a comfortable seat. Then you shall witness the Eighth Wonder of the World!”

  They swarmed the bar. Arch and I found a quiet corner. He asked where I’d been.

  “Upstairs. The second part of the show is a live performance by the two stars. Did you find Connie?”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t seen her, but I’ve only seen one waitress with black hair, so if there are two of them . . .”

  We were still talking a few minutes later when I saw a familiar figure near the front doors, a guy in a plumed hat, white death’s head mask, and a red satin cloak. He carried a tall stick with a skull on top, all of it just like Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera. I nudged Arch and said, “I think that’s the guy I was telling you about, the extortionist from the joint up on Fifth.”

  “Not exactly a wallflower, is he?”

  Even among the togas, generals, and cop uniforms, he was hard to miss, but as guys moved into the seats, I lost sight of him. The truth is I wasn’t that interested in him. I still wanted to find Connie, if she was there. I didn’t see her or any of the other waitresses.

  When the gaslights went down, I moved toward the other side of the room near the projection booth. A spotlight came on and there was Bobby on the dais again. I could see that he was sweating through the makeup.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “Before we begin tonight’s presentation, I want to welcome some new members to our association. You’ve chosen a good time to join us. Those of you who have been with us for some time know that we strive to present only the very highest-quality entertainment for worldly and open-minded gentlemen. We produce the motion pictures that the Hollywood studios cannot, dare not present, but with all the allure, mystery, and carnality that is at the heart of every great drama from Euripides to—”

  “Get on with it, you windy bastard,” somebody yelled from the crowd and everybody laughed.

  Bobby laughed too and said, “All right then, you impatient sons of bitches, here it is, my masterpiece”—he grabbed his crotch—“the real Kong.”