I’m working, I tell myself, writing AJ/MJ? on a Post-it. I write in what I know about her: Tea Shop Village, Nolita, SoHo? Cartoonist. Bird logo? Rose tattoo on wrist. I stare at the sparseness of it and then draw in a rose to fill in the empty space. I stick it onto the blank wall to the right of my desk and then stare at it.
“No cartooning career in your future, kid,” I say out loud.
“Do you want me to look up cartooning classes?” Bot asks.
“No,” I tell her, “but can you look up tea shops for me in downtown Manhattan?”
“Here are some tea shops below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan.” She lists six. There’s an English-themed one called Tea & Sympathy, two Japanese ones, a Korean bubble tea room, one called Harney & Sons in SoHo, and a Bosie Tea Parlor, named after Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend, in the West Village. My mouth is watering for a scone with clotted cream and jam by the time she finishes listing them.
I could take the A train downtown and scout out all these places in an afternoon. Graze through a couple varieties of Oolong and some tea-infused macarons while I’m at it.
Why not?
It would be like the old days when Sylvia would send me on a mission to find out the ten best organic chocolatiers for Valentine’s Day—
This is my job. I can’t do it all from my apartment. Maybe if I pretend I am doing this for one of Sylvia’s assignments I will transport myself back into the person who could traipse all around the city without a care in the world—
Like the girl who stumbled drunkenly into her building without checking who was behind her—
No. Not that girl. I’m just taking the A train downtown in broad daylight to have tea, for God’s sake.
I get in the shower and try to calm myself. In my head I plan out my route, starting with Tea & Sympathy, which is near the A stop on Fourteenth Street, working down to Bosie Tea Parlor on Morton Street, then heading east to Harney’s in SoHo.
I dress in jeans, turtleneck, and blazer, but spend a little extra time on makeup, using foundation to liven up my pasty skin and concealer to hide the dark rings under my eyes. I put my long hair up in a twist and promise myself I’ll make an appointment to get it cut. I stop at my desk to print out a list of the tea shops and realize there are several more on my route that don’t fit. It would help if I could narrow down the possibilities by calling them and finding out if there’s an AJ or MJ who works there.
At Tea & Sympathy I learn there’s a Mary Jo who sometimes goes by MJ but she doesn’t have a shift until tomorrow.
At Bosie Tea Parlor there’s a Molly Johnson who’s in later.
At Harney’s there’s a CJ and an Alice John who might go by AJ or Allie or Allison.
There are no MJ/AJ variations at the Japanese and Korean tea shops. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t one three years ago—or that the AJ/MJ I’m looking for hasn’t quit long ago. Still, I can probably find out more if I just go to these places.
As I’m getting up, though, I have another idea. I click on Bosie’s Twitter account and see they’ve got 411 followers. I start scrolling down the list and find that, along with tea purveyors and tea magazines and tea bloggers, many of the followers are girls with quirky background photos and quixotic profiles. Ivy is an urban explorer and tea lover. Shana’s vices are Star Wars and happy hour. Lauren is a photographer and, like Ivy, an urban explorer. A lot of them list “urban explorer” as if it’s a hobby, like spelunking. I have a feeling that at least some of these girls work at Bosie. Then there she is: AJ. Free Spirit. Artist. Tea Enthusiast. Her background picture is a pair of Anime eyes and a drawing of a raven. Her profile picture is literally her face in profile, all but hidden by a high Victorian coat collar, round tinted glasses, and a mane of dark hair. I click on her Twitter account and find that her last post was in June—a drawing she’d done of a man and woman asleep on the subway. It’s quite good. I scroll down through her posts—her own drawings, retweets of other artists’ drawings, still lifes of New York City scenes, fancy art pens poised on sketch pads, a delicate hand holding a teacup—
A hand with a rose tattooed on the wrist.
This is the girl. I’m sure of it.
Excited, I click on her Facebook page and scroll through photos of her and her friends. All the pictures of her are partial views in shadow. Still she looks familiar to me. I could swear I’ve seen her before. She could be one of the interns at Manahatta or the barista who used to make my morning macchiato, or the girl who cut my hair in the East Village. When I think of all the young women I have crossed paths with in the last few years their faces blur together as if my current damaged eyesight has retroactively blurred my memories of the past.
Or maybe I’m too brain damaged to recognize her. But at least I’ve got her. I call up Bosie again and ask if the AJ who’s a cartoonist still works there. The woman tells me no, that AJ ghosted them a few months ago.
“Do you know where she’s working now?”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t just give out personal information about our servers on the phone,” she says prissily before hanging up.
I could get more in person, I’m sure. But first I send AJ a Facebook friend request, a personal tweet, and a message on her Instagram account. “Hey,” I say in each, “I’d like to interview you for a book I’m doing about New York cartoonists.”
Then I go back to her Facebook account. In August a few dozen people wished her Happy Birthday, but there were no replies from AJ, no thank-yous, not even a on the birthday wishes.
That is strange.
What I should do is go downtown to talk to her coworkers.
I close my laptop and get up to go, checking that I have my keys, wallet, and phone. Then I stand at the door, willing myself to open it. I review the steps I’ll have to take to get downtown—and I start to shake. My ears are ringing and I feel lightheaded, my heart pounding so hard I can hear it knocking against my ribs—
No, it’s someone knocking at the door. I look on the camera and see Lillian, poised expectantly outside my door, holding a plate of cookies. When I open the door her eyes brighten at my outfit and then dim.
“Oh, you look so nice. You must be on your way out.”
“Not at all,” I say, reflecting that it’s not entirely a lie. I really wasn’t on my way anywhere. “I was just going to have tea. Come on in.”
LILLIAN LAUNCHES INTO her story quickly today without any prompting from me. “I’ve been thinking about what you asked me last time about whether Frank was offering me a deal to help Tommy in exchange for spying on Eddie Silver, and I think you were right. Frank was very ambitious. He wanted to impress his boss, the DA, and put Eddie behind bars. If that meant using a pretty, naïve girl to help him . . . well, I don’t really blame him. But I wasn’t just a naïve girl. I wanted to get Eddie Silver, too, and all the men like him who had preyed on my brother and gotten him in trouble. Tommy never would have had that gun if not for Eddie. That poor girl Arlene wouldn’t have been killed and Tommy wouldn’t have been in prison.”
A different Lillian emerges as she talks. Fierce. Angry.
“That was very brave of you,” I acknowledge.
“Oh,” she says, laughing it off, “I suppose I also fancied wearing new dresses and going to clubs. I’d been poor for so very long, it felt marvelous to have something new to wear and plenty to eat. My tips at the Stork Club for one night were more than I made in a week as a stenographer and the chef always put aside food for me to take home—slabs of roast beef and dinner rolls and chocolate éclairs. I would have gotten fat if I hadn’t spent the nights dancing.”
Her eyes are gleaming now and I can picture this young Lillian, seizing the chance to live life. “Where would you go dancing?” I ask.
“Oh, Roseland, and the Savoy up in Harlem. We’d always end up at Prospect Hall in Brooklyn, though, because it was on the way home. Eddie would take a few of the girls with him and tell us to have a good time. He’d disappear in the back ‘on bus
iness.’ My job was to remember the names of the men he met with and listen in to what they were talking about.”
“But if you were on the dance floor—”
“Oh,” Lillian says, a sly smile in her eyes. “I would find reasons to go back there. To ask Eddie to come out for a dance or because I wanted one of his expensive cigarettes. I recognized the men he was with because Frank had shown me pictures. There were the big bosses, Albert Anastasia and Frank Costello, and the hired guns, like Joe Adonis and Abe Reles—now, there was a man to make your blood run cold. They called him Kid Twist because of the way he liked to sneak up behind a man and slip a garotte around his neck and strangle him to death.”
“Weren’t you scared to be around men like that?”
“I knew they wouldn’t try anything, because I was under Eddie’s protection. And Eddie—” She tilts her head and smiles at me. “I bet you want to ask if he took advantage of me.”
It’s true I’ve been wondering what their relationship entailed—how far she’d been willing to go in her role of undercover agent—but I find myself shy of bringing up sex with this nice old lady. Though perhaps my reticence is doing a disservice to Lillian. Maybe she wants to tell the truth after all these years.
“Yes,” I say, returning her playful look with a serious one. “If you’re able to tell me. I imagine a man like Eddie Silver would have expected sexual favors—”
“Oh, but he didn’t—at least, not from me,” Lillian exclaims, unembarrassed. “You see, he still thought of me as his Irish Rose, his sweet lass from the old country, never mind I was born in Flatbush. His róisín dubh, he’d call me, his black rose, after an old Irish song. He never touched me, and he made it clear to his underlings that I was off-limits. So you see, I was safe . . . at least until . . .” A shadow passes over her face, her bright-green eyes turning as flat as corroded pennies.
“Until?” I prompt.
She sighs. “Until I saw something I shouldn’t.” She takes a deep breath. For a moment I think she won’t be able to go on. I have to restrain myself from prompting her, but then when she starts again, the words spill out as if they’ve been building up inside her, waiting to escape.
“One night we were out and Eddie says, ‘I have to pay a visit to an old friend who’s staying in a hotel.’ We were in Brooklyn and he offered to drop me home if I was tired but I said, ‘No, I’m wide-awake,’ because I was thinking Frank would want to know about this friend. When we pulled up in front of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island I knew I was right—”
The Half Moon Hotel jars a memory, but I can’t grasp it.
“Because that’s where the police were keeping Abe Reles, who had turned state’s witness against the mob and was informing on all his former colleagues in exchange for immunity. Abe was on the top two floors, guarded by a dozen policemen, so I didn’t think that’s where we were going. And we weren’t, at first. We went to a suite on the fourth floor, where a couple of fellows were sitting around smoking and drinking with a girl, who turned out to be Rose.”
Seeing my surprise she nods. “I hadn’t seen much of Rose since I’d taken her place at the Stork. ‘You keep it,’ she’d told me, ‘I have better ways to make a buck.’ I had a hunch what that better way was, and I guessed she was embarrassed for me to see what she’d become. I’d catch a glimpse of her every now and then on the arm of one mobster or another, one of whom must’ve brought her to the Half Moon that night. I barely recognized her. She had the glassy eyes of a doper, and she was dressed like a floozy. When she saw me I was afraid she’d let on that my name wasn’t really Rose, but she only laughed and said, ‘Well, look what the cat dragged in, fellows, Second Hand Rose.’ Eddie laughed like it was a fine joke. ‘Two Irish Roses! A couple more and we’ll have a bouquet. Just what we need to distract the boys in blue upstairs.’”
“Did he mean the policemen guarding Abe Reles?” I ask.
“Yes. That’s why Eddie brought me. He wanted Rose and me to entertain the police while he took care of Abe so that Abe couldn’t testify against him and his friend. I tried to laugh it off. ‘You know I can’t sing a note, Eddie, how do you expect me to entertain them?’ And he answered, ‘I don’t know, Lil, maybe by doing impersonations.’
“I went cold all over when I realized he knew my real name, but Rose came to my rescue. ‘Don’t be sore, Eddie, Lil filled in for me one night. The Two Flowers of Mary Magdalene, we called ourselves back at St. Stephens. Even the nuns mixed us up.’ That wasn’t right,” Lillian tells me, as if anxious I get the right details down. “The rose and the lily were the two flowers of the Virgin Mary, but Rose was making a joke. Then she said to me, ‘Don’t worry, Lil, I’ll show you how it’s done.’ She winked at me and I thought it would be all right. At any rate, I didn’t dare refuse, or Eddie would guess I’d been stringing him along the whole time. So I laughed and said I just needed to powder my nose. I went to the bathroom and looked out the window. There were police cars parked down below. Maybe I could get a message to Frank through them—but I also saw one of Eddie’s goons pacing back and forth and I knew if he saw me drop something out the window it could get back to Eddie. So I ran cold water over my hands and freshened my lipstick and told my reflection in the mirror, ‘You can do this, Lillian,’ and I went out and said, ‘Let’s go see those coppers.’ One of Eddie’s guys took us to a room on the fifth floor, which I knew from what Frank had told me was right below where they were keeping Reles. It was a suite with a bedroom and a sitting area. ‘Wait here,’ he told me and Rose. When he was gone I turned to Rose. ‘What do they expect us to do?’ I asked.
“‘What do you think?’ she said, lighting a cigarette and sitting down in a chair. Then she laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not doing the same with Eddie, what with all the time you’ve been spending with him.’
“When she saw my face she stopped laughing. ‘My pure Lily, only you could manage to stay lily white in such a dung heap. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.’
“Then Eddie’s man was back with two policemen. ‘What did I tell you, boys, two blushing Irish roses.’ One of the cops was big and red-faced, drunk already, but the other was young and skinny, a freckle-faced boy not much older than my Tommy. Rose turned on the radio and sashayed up to the big one and coaxed him into a big chair. ‘Let’s get you fellas something to drink. Lil, why don’t you ask that lug outside to get us some ice.’ She did what she could to delay the inevitable. She plied her big guy with enough drink to sink a battleship and signaled me to do the same as she pulled hers by his tie into the other room. At first I thought it was going to be all right. My fellow was so shy he could barely talk to me. Ernest was his name. He seemed relieved when I asked him questions about himself and he launched into a long, boring history of his education and ambitions in law enforcement and how many push-ups he did for his physical exam.
“‘Your mother must be so proud of you,’ I said, thinking that mention of his mother might dampen his sex drive. But instead he took it as an invitation to lunge across the settee at me. He was so clumsy, like a big wet dog, that I laughed.
“He slapped me.
“Well, I was used to fighting on the streets, so I slapped him right back. He looked surprised—and then angry. He pinned me to the sofa and started grinding his hips against me. I tried to push him away. He wasn’t very tall, but he was strong—all those push-ups—and he was crushing me down into that big soft couch, which smelled like mildew. A cushion fell over my face—or maybe he pushed it over my face—and I suddenly couldn’t see or breathe. It felt like I was drowning . . .”
Her voice catches as if she really was choking, and I reach out to touch her hand. She grips mine as if I could pull her back to safety.
“I wrenched my neck around to get air. I remember ‘You Made Me Love You’ was playing on the radio. I could see the table with the drinks and the window beyond. I kept my eyes on the window as if I could fly out of it—and that’s how I saw the body fall. I screamed,
but Ernest just covered my face with the cushion. I was going to die, I thought, just like the man who fell from the window. I was in a place of death . . .”
Lillian looked at me and I saw the terror in her eyes. She was in that room in the Half Moon Hotel, battling for her life, seventy-seven years ago. A piece of her was always in that room, just as a piece of me would always be on the threshold of my old apartment feeling that hand over my mouth. I reached out and squeezed her hand.
“But then someone was pulling Ernest off me—the big cop—shouting, ‘Come on, lover boy, we got trouble!’ Ernest looked confused. I had the feeling he was going to have that confused look on his face for the rest of his life, never understanding what had gone wrong with all his big plans. The minute I could get up I ran to the window. There was a body on the roof below us, one leg bent back the wrong way, face looking up at the sky. You could see right away that he was dead. Then Rose was pulling me to the door saying, ‘Come on, we gotta scram.’ We ran to the back stairs and Rose told me to wait while she looked down to see if the coast was clear. She opened the door and I leaned against the wall trying to straighten my skirt and blouse. My stockings were torn and the snap on my garter was broken. I could hear voices coming from the open door. One of them was Eddie.
“‘The girls done their part keeping your boys busy, but now they’re a liability. You can take care of them . . .’
“I heard another man’s voice—a deeper rumble—but then the door closed and Rose was shaking me. ‘Eddie’s sending someone to kill us. We have to hide.’ She pulled me into a janitor’s closet. It smelled like bleach and mildew . . . like that awful couch. I must have been shaking because Rose put her arms around me and held me. I bit my lip so hard to keep from crying out that I tasted blood. I heard footsteps going down the hall and a door opening and closing. That must have been Eddie’s hit man going into the suite. Rose cracked the door open and peeked out, then pulled me out of the closet. We ran down the back stairs and out into an alley. The police car was parked across the street on Surf Avenue, as if it still had something to guard. Rose pulled me the other way, toward the boardwalk, but instead of walking on top of it she pulled me underneath it. It was pitch-black down there, except for the places where the streetlights slanted through the boards. The sand was cold and damp. I could hear the waves pounding on the shore and it felt like it was the sound of my heart hammering against my ribs and my blood rushing in my veins—but then Rose stopped me and put her hand over my mouth while she looked up. Someone was walking above us. I could see his shadow when he moved under the streetlamp, the shape of a man in a belted trench coat and a fedora, stretched out over the planks of the boardwalk, creeping toward us. I crouched down in the sand while he passed over us and I remembered kneeling in the cold sand next to poor dead Arlene. It felt like the shadow of death moving over us and I thought of what my mother used to say when she got a sudden chill—”
The Stranger Behind You Page 18