Tom had to save the city from its reformers. He’d ruin things for Ed Smith. For any and all of those damn reformers. Those damn hypocrites.
Joe Meinhof set it up with some boys who could cause trouble. Tom was going to turn them loose.
“I wouldn’t want to be Ed Smith, I’ll tell you that much,” Meinhof said. “There’s soldiers coming home from France, and already they’re not happy. Lots of folks ain’t happy. Their jobs been filled by blacks. We’re doing something about it. Ed Smith and his cronies won’t do shit.”
“I think you’re right,” Tom muttered. “Let the bastards have it their way for a while. Then they’ll be glad to see us back.”
Tom didn’t know if boys needed encouragement to do bad things in the first place. This might be their natural state. To go out and destroy property. To fight a cop. To paint their faces and stick it to a girl. The whole country was different after the war. They were all changed. In particular those boys who grew up knowing nothing but war, mustard gas, tanks, biplanes with machine guns strapped to the wings; boys who couldn’t remember anything else but bad feelings let loose and fighting like fighting was the only thing, and how blackies were around to mess things up for the people who were supposed to have the good life.
Maybe it was wrong to take advantage of the circumstances. Who’s to say?
Tom saw how it was different for these kids. Billy told him what was going on. What a success the dorming house was, how the boys Joe Meinhof kept there were abler than most lieutenants. Tom didn’t believe it at first but it was true. Those kids did what you told them. It was glorious and simple. A thing of beauty.
Evie had plenty of friends who did themselves in. Girls from the neighborhood who did what they felt they must once the party ended. Dried up. Lonely. States of affairs to be avoided at all costs. But a girl grew older. All folks did, the world over, forever, of course. There was a difference, though. If a girl had strange predilections, her habits led to darkness. If she was used to druggings, to self-abuse, to absorbing men’s cruelty in good humor. All this led to one thing.
Evie always swore she wouldn’t end up like that. She never worked a big palace, for instance, and had never seen the inside of an opium den. At her lowest she made herself attest to having self-respect, even if she didn’t believe she did, another of her habits. She’d never give any love away—she promised this too. She’d keep all the love she had for herself. She wouldn’t think like those girls who did away with themselves. Evie had other, greater talents besides the things her body could do. And Jake had left her a thousand-dollar bill whether he’d meant to or not.
She started in on business the summer of 1918, a series of small jobs for girls who owed her a favor, just enough to get by until she could figure out what to do with the thousand. It wasn’t that she didn’t want the money. Who wouldn’t? That much cash could take her anywhere, in theory. But, in reality, the thousand was invalid. Tom Dennison was watching. Jake was still in Omaha then, but they weren’t talking and it wouldn’t have been worth it to bring this up. Dennison was the only one who could change money like that, so Evie brought the thousand back to him.
He ordered her to sit once she was up in his office. “This won’t take a minute,” she said, refusing the chair. She plucked the thousand from her handbag and slapped it to the desk. Dennison stared back at her. “What do I want with this?”
“It’s yours,” she said. “Take it.”
“Who gave this to you? Did you steal it?”
“Say I found it. It’s yours, so what’s the difference? You got it back.”
“Don’t try to be smart. I know where you got it. Do you think you’ll get Jake out of trouble, bringing this to me?” Dennison turned to Billy Nesselhous. “I’m not sure who’s buying off who anymore.”
Evie looked down at the chair where he’d wanted her to sit. Tiny, low to the floor, a chair for a child. These men played such games, always picking at and belittling each other. No wonder they trusted no one. Thugs lined the walls. They made a point to stand behind her, to make her want to sit. Evie felt their eyes where her dress clung to her hips.
“What does Jake want you to do?” Dennison asked. “Are you going to marry him?”
“Not a chance. We’re through.”
Dennison and Billy looked to each other again. Billy shook his head, like he thought she was lying. “Say you don’t get married. Then what will you do?”
Evie said she sewed for the girls on her block, which was true. There wasn’t much business, but she made do.
“Hmph,” he said. That was the end. A man hmphing himself was all. She didn’t need to be there for that. Evie turned to walk away, but Dennison stopped her.
“You get ten percent,” he said. “A finder’s fee.”
On the table was a hundred dollars in small bills. “I’ll set you up with a woman. She makes dresses and she’s got a lot of business. More than she can handle. If you’re being straight with me, you’ll get the excess.”
Evie couldn’t figure why he was helping her. “Is it Jake?” she asked. “Is that why?”
“Don’t go around thinking I owe you anything, or you me. That’s all. Don’t talk to him again and we’ll be square. You understand?”
Evie didn’t care. “Why would I want to see that rube again?”
She regretted putting it like that, like she really had been conning Jake, like she’d tricked him into thinking the love she offered was anything but real. She wasn’t bothered for long, though. She counted the hundred and made the deal. She’d be set up fat.
She didn’t even wait a day before meeting the dressmaker, a lady entrepreneur who could teach Evie how to deal with merchants, how to keep accounts, how to make deadbeats pay. Evie had dozens of things to ask, and there were a thousand more she’d learn along the way. It was one thing to sew for yourself, to create your own fashions, and quite another to impose an intelligent design on an unsuspecting client. The dressmaker wore a demure black suit that fit over her smoothly. She was happy to tell what she knew about the trade and the craft. Evie was surprised by this kindness. In every trade she’d trafficked before, a girl tried her hardest to keep a fresher face out of the game, to reduce competition. There were mean tricks all girls were trained in from birth. It wasn’t so hard to make a girl feel bad about herself if that was what you were after. But the dressmaker wasn’t like this. She advised Evie to never let a man hold her money if she could avoid it, especially not a bank, where the regulations were designed to rid a businesswoman of what was deemed her excess capital. The dressmaker sounded persecuted and crass at times, but Evie saw how this was necessary. This woman was a success; she’d become one by keeping the fact of her success a secret. Nobody could take from her what they didn’t know she had. From the outside it looked like she kept a shabby shop, with gaps in the window glazing, a small showroom where a client undressed in the open. To an outsider her company was nothing to be jealous of. It brought in cash all the same. A small but dedicated clientele was convinced of the dressmaker’s vitality. Quality was high. This was enough.
“Maybe you’re not such a nice woman at heart,” the lady told Evie. “But you’ll be all right. It was smart going to Tom Dennison. You did well.”
Evie was busy with her own shop before long, making dresses, slips, camisoles, and scarves for working girls. So maybe it didn’t matter when she heard that Jake skipped town. She accepted his leaving. Keeping her end of the deal with Dennison would be easier if Jake was gone. As Evie saw it, she and Jake were the separate legs of an X. As one’s fortune rose, the other’s fell. While rumors spread about Jake and the scandal he’d brought on himself, Evie set up shop out of her rooms on Capitol Avenue and was making a killing.
Her main room was cleared of the lounging furniture. The dimensions redesigned with new purpose, the room made longer. Evie had a box couch and small table constructed at the window, one with only room enough for her. Curtains lined the couch so she could block out the
workroom—something she almost never did—to sit quietly alone at the open window, to look down at the street. If she was home, she might as well be working. Evie ate breakfast at the nook table, but that was all. Otherwise, she indulged her vocation. The old worktable was preserved, of course, and the wire dummy acquired fresh cousins to accommodate the several garments Evie worked on at a time. She bought a new treadle sewing machine now that she had room for one, and kept it at the center of her rooms, its oiled wood and iron pedal. Her mother had owned something similar, so Evie knew how to make it work. Around her bed in the other room, she stored bolts of fabric and bins filled with sequins and beads.
To look at her rooms one might have believed it was a lonesome life Evie lived. (Why, she wondered, didn’t anyone have such thoughts about her loneliness when she was a kept woman?) But her rooms were always busy those days. With madams coming in to place orders for their girls, and the girls trying on dresses or stopping in to see how the work came along, to escape their own petty cell in a palace. To enter a workshop was no idle thing for these girls. Here they were allowed to linger and observe craft coming together, instead of being spritzed endlessly with perfume, or popping champagne corks, or the nonstop washing and checking of their bodies by the state examiner. To sit and gossip was a fine thing. To be treated like a lady.
The girls teased Evie about the money she must be bringing in. They knew what expenses the madam passed on to them for garments, which was never the same as Evie charged, but she still made plenty. “With what kale you got, why don’t you go see some far-off corner of the globe?” “Paris.” “An island someplace.” “Shit. Even a day in Kansas City got to be better than sitting around here.”
“Why not get with a family?” one girl always asked. A new girl, or an old one, ones on adjacent points of a cycle. “Have some babies. Let me live with you! Ha! I’d be your kid.”
“That isn’t for me,” Evie replied. “I like it like this.”
“What about your mother then? Send for her.”
Evie told how her mother had taught her all about needlework and the making of clothes. The girls thought it would be a great thing to send for her if she was poor. To enjoy the profits and help with the work. It wasn’t like that, Evie explained. “My mother couldn’t get along here. There’s one spot in Topeka she’s been allowed to live her whole life, and that’s where she’d want to stay.” Evie didn’t know if what she said about her mother’s wishes was entirely true. She didn’t want to find out what her mother would think of all this, the way Evie lived. That was all.
The girls asked about Jake.
In a way those girls admired Evie for what happened. It was said that Jake had been bamboozled by her, that he was done in because of the things his girl demanded. That poor, bewitched boy—a wicked, conniving woman was behind it all. If this was true, the girls said, good for her. “If a man can’t give what’s needed then he gets what he gets.”
Evie didn’t feel that way. It wasn’t that Jake didn’t give what she demanded; he couldn’t accept what she could provide. Not such a small distinction, after all.
He returned to her in late September 1919, on a Wednesday. She’d received a letter from him a few weeks before in which he asked permission to stop by and say hello. He was going to take the Miihlsteins to a carnival on the Ak-Sar-Ben midway, he said, and wouldn’t be in Omaha long. By contract, Evie shouldn’t have allowed a visit. But she replied without thinking. In a note she dashed off immediately, she told him he could say hello if he was going to be around.
When the day came, Jake arrived early because the kids were gone from the Eigler house when he went to surprise them. “Only Herr Miihlstein was there. Anna’s still at that home. Miihlstein didn’t know where Karel was. He hardly comes around at all.”
His voice was shaking. He was outside in the hallway because she didn’t ask him to come in. He explained that he didn’t work for Tom Dennison anymore and had just come to visit.
Evie knew Jake was living in Lincoln, something that surprised him, since nobody wrote him there, he said. “There was a lot of talk after you left,” she said. “Rumors you’d been run off, or killed for being unfaithful to Dennison, that you’d gone back where you came from, that I gave you syphilis and the both of us were committed to a sanitarium to lose our minds. Folks said you killed a man and ran to Kansas City until the heat wore off. But I got to the bottom of it,” Evie said. “Maria Eigler told me the truth.”
“The truth?”
“Tom ran you out, didn’t he? For you not being who he thought you were.”
He laughed at that. “I hoped nobody would know. I lost that thousand-dollar bill and it was all over. Nobody is so dumb they’d forgive that, yeah. Tom let me leave. That’s something.”
Jake doesn’t know, Evie realized. Nobody ever told him that she’d given the thousand back to Dennison, even as they ran him off, and that was what saved his hide.
“Tom’s a forgiving man, isn’t he?” Evie said.
“A thousand dollars. More than that.” Jake’s eyes wet thinking of all that money. “Did I ever have so much as all that? Seems impossible now.”
At her suggestion they went for a walk. Neither knew how long they’d go or where. He led down to the Flatiron. Reinhold had sent him a letter—There’s one letter, Evie thought—telling how the big project under the city was nearly done. “The tunnels aren’t being used yet,” Jake said, “but they’re close.” They walked without looking at each other. Strolling in half strides, staring at the pavement. He detailed things she didn’t really care to know about the tunnels. How permanent lighting was wired in and gravel spread over the bottom of the corridors. A spiral staircase replaced a dumbwaiter from the hotel kitchen. “It’s all just piddling now. They don’t even dig. Not since last week.”
Jake stopped to have a look around. He paced the pavement, led Evie across the street to stare down at the bricks in one spot, then back across to another. Somewhere around here, he explained, was where he struck down Ugo with the backside of a spade.
“Is this the spot?” Evie asked. “Below us? Where we’re standing now?”
Jake said he’d know if he were under the surface. He’d remember the bend, the dip in the tunnel floor. But he hadn’t been down there since, and it was impossible to tell otherwise.
“Then why say anything? Is this why you came back? To dig up the business with Ugo?”
She saw that Jake was shaking again. “There’s no reason,” he said. “I wanted to see you. You understand that.”
“Come on,” Evie said, leading back into downtown. “Where else does the tunnel go?”
They followed along the surface. Around city blocks and buildings, as diagonal as he could navigate the squared city grid, north on Eighteenth Street to Douglas, near bustling Hotel Fontenelle, then down Dodge to Eleventh. They were moving liquor in the tunnels, into hotel kitchens, all the way to the terminus north of Capitol Avenue, where a new red light called the arcade was open for business. The arcade was in an alleyway between two brick buildings where Tom Dennison’s infamous Sporting District used to be, years ago, before that was shut down by a previous generation of reformers. Iron gates were posted at each end now, painted red and decorated with lights. There were dozens of cribs, small chambers that held women. Each crib had two areas, an entryway, a cot beyond the divider. A door and window formed the projecting front, the whole thing about six feet high, shorter than Jake. Girls waited in windows to have their shapes appraised by whoever moved along the line. Businessmen over lunch hour, high schoolers skipping class. This was what passed for discreet, even in this reform era, at least in the context of what had gone on so publicly for years down on the river flats.
There was nothing on the river where the flats used to be. Evie knew this. Mud and garbage. All the tents gone. There were the pig iron mills, the river and its spit foam, its blackened tree trunks floating along, gray mud slick across its banks. The tents with girls inside had been replac
ed by this glittering fantasy. The girls in the arcade had on silk robes and their hair was pinned up. They joked loud like they’d spent the morning drinking. One of them looked familiar to Jake and he said so to Evie. He thought the girl was named Doreen. “The girl in the red dress.” He pointed her out. “Raped in Riverview Park two years ago. Had her fiancé run out on her. I know her.”
This girl wore what was supposed to look like a cocktail dress but was really a slip that enabled her to fuck quick. Evie had made it for the girl and knew she wasn’t Doreen. This girl, tall and slender, Mary, walked right by the both of them. She had a rigid jaw, a small mouth, narrow eyes. Jake followed her to the gates. “I’m sure it’s her,” he said.
“It isn’t Doreen,” Evie said. “It can’t be. Doreen killed herself.”
A chippie taking her life wasn’t news, but Evie remembered how it ended for Doreen. She’d wandered the streets until someone grabbed her and said they’d take care of her. They fed her, bought her some clothes, some liquor, led her down the basement stairs of an opium den. Doreen lasted a year on the flats. That was long enough. She grabbed the exposed circuit wire that ran through her tent and took it in her mouth. A john had just walked in. Lights flickered all along the river before going out, the length of the flats and on Capitol Avenue. Doreen bit into the wire and broke the circuit. She had to be cut loose because her teeth fused to the metal.
Kings of Broken Things Page 25